Monaghan: A Letter to My Wife

A novel of epic sweep made of exquisite lyrical sentences, moving between the boarderlands of Ireland and the American coastline.

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. 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. 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. The three men’s lives merge and conflict, fall and rise, as they move towards and through their personal crises.

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.

In collaboration with the artist Anthony Lott, Monaghan extends Timothy O’Grady’s bringing of text and image together to explore the making of art, quests and reckonings, war and the psychic costs levied both on those who practise it and those who don’t.