Two young women are going on a pre-wedding shopping spree when their outing is cut short. A young boy wants to surprise his big brother with a newly polished gun, with unexpected consequences. Two professional men meet for a day’s hunting on the hills east of Belfast, and their idyllic day is haunted by thoughts of leaving home.

Welcome to the fictional territory of Patrick Taylor. Taylor is a doctor of medicine and a professor who has lived in British Columbia since 1970. For his first collection of stories he goes back to Northern Ireland augmenting his memories of life there with descriptions of characters trapped in the land’s political conflicts.

It is difficult to decide if Only Wounded is actually a novel or a collection of stories. Some characters return again and again, creating a thread of interest over and above the many characters who appear only once. Between each story, statistics culled from Belfast’s The Telegraph keep a running tally of deaths from Ulster’s political violence.

These interruptions from the public world, though, end up being part of the point. Taylor does a good job drawing personalities with fine strokes, only to have politics end up taking over their lives. The ill-fated shoppers, the hopeful young boy, the recruit to the army who ends up on the wrong side of the army lines, and the many others destined to remain lost in the conflict stand in contrast to the lawyer who eventually escapes to Canada. There, from the relatively safe location of Vancouver harbour, he can listen to his friend describe Ireland as a place of, “Too many scars. Too many wounds.”

Through the narrative comes Taylor’s indictment of violence, his determination to expose those profiting from the conflict, and his creation of empathy with history’s victims in their atmosphere of helplessness. Only Wounded is a strong literary debut from a promising writer.