Timothy O'Grady – författare

'Think about a tune ... the unsayable, the invisible, the longing in music. Here is a book of tunes without musical notes ... It wrings the heart' John Berger'The voice that O'Grady has crafted succeeds so well ... running in parallel, Pyke's stark arresting images are laced between the paragraphs and chapters. The interplay between the two mediums is delicately powerful' Hilary White'A masterpiece' Robert Macfarlane'O'Grady does not just respond to Pyke's stark, beautiful photographs: he gives voice to thousands' Louise Kennedy'The experience of Irish emigration uniquely and powerfully illuminated' Mark Knopfler'If the words tell the story of the voiceless, the bleak lovely photographs show their faces. Fiction rarely gets as close to the messy, glorious truth as do memories and photographs. This rare novel dares to use both' Charlotte Mendelson, TLSAn old man lies alone and sleepless in London. Before dawn he is taken by an image from his childhood in the West of Ireland, and begins to remember a migrant's life. Haunted by the faces and the land he left behind, he calls forth the bars and boxing booths of England, the potato fields and building sites, the music he played and the woman he loved.Timothy O'Grady's tender, vivid prose and Steve Pyke's starkly beautiful photographs combine to make a unique work of fiction, an act of remembering suffused with loss, defiance and an unforgettable loveliness. An Irish life with echoes of the lives of unregarded migrant workers everywhere. Since it was first published in 1997, I Could Read the Sky has achieved the status of a classic.

In 1973, aged twenty-two, Timothy O'Grady left America. For the next thirty years he lived in and wrote about Europe. As he did, the American counter-culture crashed, Ronald Reagan came and went, wars were declared and the country was attacked by air. Much of the world began to look at America in a new way, wondering what had happened to it and where it was going. Among them was Timothy O'Grady, and he decided to go back and investigate.He went out onto the American road, travelling over fifteen thousand miles through thirty-five states. He met academics, the homeless, war veterans, political activists, New Orleans rappers, billionaires, novelists and a Ku Klux Klansman. In every bar he stopped in, it seemed, there was a story of American life to be heard.

Weather, hazards, poor coordination, erratic biorhythms, hangovers, an unruly mind and statistical improbability - these are just a few of the obstacles to hitting a pure golf shot. Che Guevara, Alice Cooper, Dennis Hopper, and Tiger Woods have all struggled with the above to a greater or lesser degree. And, since being initiated as a child into the arcane mysteries of the game of golf, Timothy O'Grady too has carried in his mind an obsession with the sport, shrugging off its social unacceptability and embracing its history, its literature and his own private battle with the club. For O'Grady, the obsession has, at times, been all-consuming and On Golf is structured around a personal history - how his father played and taught him, how the game dominated his teenage years, and how father and son continued to talk manically about the game even as the older man lay fading away in the bed in which he would die. But O'Grady also discusses the rich literature of golf, from Tobias Smollett to P. G. Wodehouse, and tells us of the terrifying and glorious occasion when he got to play a round with Arnold Palmer. On Golf is the work of a great writer and a good golfer. Timothy O'Grady still dreams that he may one day become a truly fine player but in the meantime he has given us a book which beautifully describes his love affair with the game and goes to the root of the obsession that captivates so many.

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine and reading Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, and of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms and finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with and why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- and post-war Poland, to his membership of the Communist Party and his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin and then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation. Through the years that followed he wandered the world trying to escape from the memory of her. Now, back in a small town in Poland, he begins to assemble stories both from his own past and that of the young man and the woman he loved and lost until he finds himself on an unexpected quest. Light traverses Europe and parts of America, the history of physics and political changes in Central Europe. It is about love and ruin, East and West, friendship and betrayal, the search for certainty and the consequent disillusionment. It is, too, about the making of stories and how they can lead, inadvertently, to revelation.

In 1973, aged twenty-two, Timothy O'Grady left America. For the next thirty years he lived in and wrote about Europe. As he did, the American counter-culture crashed, Ronald Reagan came and went, wars were declared and the country was attacked by air. Much of the world began to look at America in a new way, wondering what had happened to it and where it was going. Among them was Timothy O'Grady, and he decided to go back and investigate.He went out onto the American road, travelling over fifteen thousand miles through thirty-five states. He met academics, the homeless, war veterans, political activists, New Orleans rappers, billionaires, novelists and a Ku Klux Klansman. In every bar he stopped in, it seemed, there was a story of American life to be heard.

'Beautiful and complex' Annie Proulx'A writer of exceptional gifts' Louise Kennedy'O'Grady strikes a beautiful note' Kevin BarryMoving from West Belfast and County Monaghan to the streets of San Francisco, Timothy O’Grady’s exhilarating new novel is an epic portrait of art and war, authenticity and selling out, told through the fates of three men.Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and teller of this tale, is a celebrated theorist of postmodern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multimillion-dollar career as an investment banker. And the mysterious Ryan, who drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Through him, the war in Ireland and its psychic legacy are brought into close focus in a way rarely seen in contemporary fiction.Their lives merge and conflict, rise and fall, as one man becomes the undoing of the next. Hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and profound, this is a novel about love and destruction, and what happens when you cannot escape your past.Featuring drawings and paintings by Anthony Lott.'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'Monaghan reveals the legacy of violence and political division in a gripping narrative and a precise and original voice' Erica Wagner, literary critic'Monaghan is written with an intensity that is remarkable in contemporary fiction . . . Timothy O’Grady is a major writer of our time' Patrick Joyce, author of Remembering Peasants

Over forty million people a year travel to Vegas, more than to Mecca. It is a global celebrity, an improbable oasis, a place offering bank-breaking fortunes and instant gratification, 24/7, with no moral debits.Award-winning writer Timothy O’Grady lived in Vegas for two years. He finally began to understand it when he talked to people who had grown up there, the children of the card dealers and cocktail shakers, the jugglers and the dancers – young people who had been bearing witness to this strange city all their lives. One had her student loans and credit card limits stolen by her father. Another fled a sequence of exploiters until she found herself living in the storm drains under the casinos. There is the boy whose father entered him into a drinking contest when he was eight, the casino owner’s son, the erudite contortionist turned stripper. Each tells their own tale.In Children of Las Vegas, O’Grady renews his partnership with renowned photographer Steve Pyke. Through short essays, Pyke’s portraits and ten witness testimonies, he pierces the city’s glittering façade to reveal the darker reality that lies beneath.

'Beautiful and complex' — Annie Proulx'A writer of exceptional gifts' — Louise Kennedy'O'Grady strikes a beautiful note' — Kevin BarryMoving from West Belfast and County Monaghan to the streets of San Francisco, Timothy O’Grady’s exhilarating new novel is an epic portrait of art and war, authenticity and selling out, told through the fates of three men.Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and teller of this tale, is a celebrated theorist of postmodern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multimillion-dollar career as an investment banker. And the mysterious Ryan, who drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Through him, the war in Ireland and its psychic legacy are brought into close focus in a way rarely seen in contemporary fiction.Their lives merge and conflict, rise and fall, as one man becomes the undoing of the next. Hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and profound, this is a novel about what happens when you cannot escape your past, featuring drawings and paintings by Anthony Lott.'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'Monaghan reveals the legacy of violence and political division in a gripping narrative and a precise and original voice' — Erica Wagner, literary critic'Monaghan is written with an intensity that is remarkable in contemporary fiction . . . Timothy O’Grady is a major writer of our time' — Patrick Joyce, author of Going to My Father’s House

The Shy Man’s Revenge charts Stephen Rea’s remarkable passage from a quiet, watchful boy in North Belfast to one of Ireland’s most singular actors. Growing up along the Antrim Road as the Troubles gathered force, he navigates a home riven by drink and silence, finding refuge instead in school plays, cinemas, and the charged language of performance. Rea’s story moves through Queen’s University, the ferment of civil rights activism, and the seismic cultural shifts that shaped his generation, before carrying him to London’s avant‑garde stages, the Abbey Theatre, and the founding of Field Day with Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. Told with lyricism, candour, and an actor’s instinct for the revealing detail, this memoir traces how a shy Belfast boy found his voice: onstage, in politics, and in Ireland’s ongoing argument with itself. A book of art, resistance, friendship and survival, it is Stephen Rea’s own hard‑won revenge.