Monaghan

‘Beautiful and complex’ Annie Proulx

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 lives 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 by Anthony Lott

‘A beautiful and complex novel written with a very high degree of literary skill. Almost every page offers pleasures to the connoisseur of modern literature’ Annie Proulx

‘A bigger, broader, polyphonic novel, told through the stories of a number of men whose lives are strangely connected to each other and to the conflict in Northern Ireland’ Ian Sansom, TLS

‘A beautiful novel, sweeping in scope yet deeply intimate’ Louise Kennedy

‘O’Grady strikes a beautiful note with this novel, its elegant sentences sweeping out across time to provide a memorable portrait of the Irish strife of the 1980s’ Kevin Barry

Hardback: 400pp

Published: Wilton Square (November 2025)

ISBN: 9781789651867