The Official Book Launch of “Monaghan” by Timothy O’Grady

The ICC is delighted to present the magnificent writer Timothy O’Grady, (author of the best-selling book ‘I Could Read the Sky’), who’ll be in-conversation with Journalist Dorothy Allen, talking about his new book Monaghan.

About ‘Monaghan’.

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, love and destruction and 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 gifts into a multi-million-dollar career as an investment banker. At the centre of the book is 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.

What people Say about Monaghan 

“A beautiful novel, sweeping in scope yet deeply intimate. Timothy O’Grady is a writer of exceptional gifts”. – Louise Kennedy, author of bestselling novel ‘TRESPASSES’.

‘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. 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 

“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 bestselling novel ‘A CROOKED TREE’.

About Timothy O’Grady

Timothy O’Grady was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London, Spain and he currently lives in Poland. He is the author of four works of non-fiction and three novels. His novel ‘Motherland’ won the David Higham award for the best first novel in 1989. “I Could Read the Sky”, (with photos from Steve Pyke), won the Encore Award for best second novel of 1997. It was also made into a feature film and also travelled as a stage show. His novel ‘Light’, was published in 2004. His non- fiction books Divine Magnetic Lands was published in 2008 and Children of Las Vegas ’was published in 2016.

About Dorothy Allen

Dorothy Allen is an award winning journalist, currently the London correspondent of Swiss magazine Tierwelt. She is a former BBC reporter, working in documentary programmes for television (Brass Tacks; Panorama) and radio (File on Four). As a print journalist, she won a Feature Writer of the Year award while reporting for the Burton Daily Mail. She has also written a weekly television review column for The Tablet magazine. Dorothy is a former Vice Chair of the Irish Literary Society. Dorothy is also a key member of the ICC Irish Literature Programming team.