Monaghan: A Letter to My Wife

Monaghan is the eighth book by one of our finest writers, Tim O'Grady.

It is a novel of epic sweep made of exquisite lyrical sentences. It moves between the borderlands of Ireland and the American coasts and addresses marriage, the making of art, quests and reckonings, war and the psychic costs levied both on those who practise it and those who don’t.

It is also formally ambitious: the collaboration with the artist Anthony Lott extends O’Grady’s bringing of text and image together, as first seen in the modern Irish classic I Could Read the Sky, created with photographer Steve Pyke. Unbound is pleased and proud to be publishing a new edition of I Could Read the Sky (in Spring 2023) which will sit alongside the paperback of O’Grady and Pyke’s documentary Children of Las Vegas (published in July 2022)

Monaghan turns on the fortunes of three men. Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and the teller of this tale, is a star theorist of post-modern architecture in New York. Ryan drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but before he could bring it to fruition he was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Gary, Indiana, parleys his mathematical gift into a multi-million dollar career as an investment banker.

The three men’s lives merge and conflict, fall and rise, as they move towards and through their personal crises. Ryan struggles to find his lost art. Ronan discovers he’s a moral and intellectual fraud and embarks on a destructive quest for redemption. Paul finds that the money he thought he needed to woo the glamorous Charlotte Silver may be the thing that makes her leave him. Each has a past that won’t let them go. All the while Monaghan drifts through – a state of mind, an exhibition of paintings, a refuge in the midst of war, a site of promises made but not fulfilled.

Monaghan is a work of drama and imagination that asks large questions – What are the costs of living an authentic life? Can art redeem? Can love? Can you recover what you fear you may have lost?