Monaghan

Timothy O’Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and four novels. His novel Motherland won the David Higham Prize for the best first novel in 1989. His novel I Could Read the Sky, a collaboration with photographer Steve Pyke, won the Encore Award for best second novel of 1997. It was filmed and also travelled as a stage show. I Could Read the Sky, Children of Las Vegas and Monaghan are published by Unbound.

'A bigger, broader, polyphonic novel, told through the stories of a number of men whose lives are strangely connected to each other and to the conflict in Northern Ireland’ Ian Sansom, TLS'A beautiful novel, sweeping in scope yet deeply intimate. Timothy O’Grady is a writer of exceptional gifts' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses'Monaghan is a beautiful and complex novel written with a very high degree of literary skill. O’Grady gives us a deep probe into the painful lives of three major characters who touch almost like balls on the billiard table that is Monaghan, over decades of wandering, self-imprisonment, endurance of the mutilations of presumed love and presumed hate. Characters torn and damaged by killing try to understand why they are the way they are, all of them grope for lost balance after years on the tightrope. Each must find reasons and ways to go on living. Brilliant images tumble over one another, a kaleidoscopic whirl of places, music, objects of value, studies of the clay behind the pot, the charcoal behind the image, the breath behind the song leave the reader dazed at O’Grady’s virtuoso work. Almost every page offers pleasures to the connoisseur of modern literature' Annie Proulx, author of 'Brokeback Mountain''O’Grady continues to write of the dislocation and loss experienced by Irish men in this inventive and lyrical novel. In Monaghan the quest for self-knowledge deepens isolation and we watch worlds implode. O’Grady evokes place, the latent violence of Ireland in the 1980s and its psychic displacements. The prose is mesmerising' Una Mannion, author of Tell Me What I Am'In this vivid novel, Timothy O’Grady shows the dark history of the twentieth century in a new light. Drawing connections between continents and across time, Monaghan reveals the legacy of violence and political division in a gripping narrative and a precise and original voice' Erica Wagner, literary critic'O’Grady strikes a beautiful note with this novel, its elegant sentences sweeping out across time to provide a memorable portrait of the Irish strife of the 1980s' Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter'Monaghan is written with an intensity that is remarkable in contemporary fiction . . . The intensity of expression in the book is underlain by a seriousness of moral purpose that marks the book out as a remarkable achievement. Writing like this is a sort of gift to us it seems to me, and one should be glad of a gift made so well. Timothy O’Grady is a major writer of our time' Patrick Joyce, author of Going to My Father’s House