Unbound launches campaign for O'Grady's eighth book

Unbound has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Monaghan: A Letter to My Wife, "a disarmingly beautiful" novel by writer Timothy O’ Grady.

The book, which is O’Grady’s eighth, was written in collaboration with artist Anthony Lott. It centres on the life of a former IRA sniper, and promises to address "large questions" about the cost of love and war. 

Unbound will also be publishing a new edition of O’Grady’s I Could Read the Sky, created with photographer Steve Pyke, in spring 2023. Publication will will be accompanied by a series of events with twice Booker short-listed author Patrick McCabe - starting at the Irish Cultural Centre in London. I Could Read the Sky will sit alongside the paperback of O’Grady and Pyke’s documentary "Children of Las Vegas", which was published by Unbound in July 2022.

John Mitchinson, co-founder and publisher at Unbound, said: “It’s such a pleasure to work with Tim again after so many years. He is an original and visionary novelist, always pushing against the boundaries of the medium. I Could Read the Sky, his 1997 collaboration with the brilliant photographer Steve Pyke, seems ahead of its time now and it’s exciting to be bringing it back in a beautiful new edition with extra photographs and accompanying audiobook. 

"But the new book, Monaghan, is something else: a novel that could only be written by a writer who has spent fifty years honing his craft: it’s a disarmingly beautiful book about what it means to love and what it means to kill, centred on a former IRA sniper. This is an important addition to the Unbound fiction list.”

O’Grady has written four works of non-fiction and three novels. “Monaghan came to me in the form of an unforgettably bleak laugh, scarred, heavy with knowledge, resigned to fate," he said. "I heard it in a room in Belfast. I’d never before met the person from whom it came, but I later learned that he’d been at the heart of the war in Ireland as an I.R.A. sniper and had since become a painter.

"It was unlike any laugh I’d ever heard, eerily so, and it seemed to contain a number of things which compelled me. They took the form of questions – What are the costs of killing, even if in the name of freedom? Is art redemptive? Is love? Is there a levy imposed on those who eschew the risks of an authentic life?"