''A writer of exceptional gifts'' Louise Kennedy

''O''Grady strikes a beautiful note'' Kevin Barry

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.

''O’Grady evokes place, the latent violence of Ireland in the 1980s and its psychic displacements. The prose is mesmerising'' Una Mannion, author of Tell Me What I Am

''Monaghan reveals the legacy of violence and political division in a gripping narrative and a precise and original voice'' Erica Wagner, literary critic

''Monaghan is written with an intensity that is remarkable in contemporary fiction . . . Timothy O’Grady is a major writer of our time'' Patrick Joyce, author of Going to My Father’s House