Monaghan

(Hardback)

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Description

Moving 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 post-modern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multi-million-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.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR I COULD READ THE SKY:

"A masterpiece." -- Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

"No book on the Irish emigrant experience has moved me more." -- Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

"Twenty-odd years on it is somehow even more luminous and richly satisfying than the first time out." -- Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

"People have been trying to read the sky for a long time. Rare masterpieces like this help us do it." -- Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times

"We are close to sean-ns. Closer still to keening. What Pyke and O'Grady have done is read our imagination." -- Dermot Healy, author of A Goat's Song

"It is a work of genius, which will be read for generations to come." -- Patrick Joyce, author of Going to My Father's House

"Everyone should read this book, the experience of Irish emigration uniquely and powerfully illuminated." -- Mark Knopfler, musician

Author Bio

Timothy O'Grady are published by Unbound.