Light

A haunting, mesmerising novel of love and loss by an award-winning novelist.

Timothy O'Grady was born in the USA and has lived in Ireland, London and Spain. He is the author (with Kenneth Griffith) of Curious Journey: An Oral History of Ireland's Unfinished Revolution, and the novels Motherland, which won the David Higham award for the best first novel in 1989, and I Could Read the Sky, which won the Encore award for best second novel of 1997. His book On Golf was published by Yellow Jersey to superb reviews in 2003.

An elderly Pole sits in a cafe in Krakow. At another table a young man with a ravaged face is drinking wine and reading Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy. They begin to talk. All through the night as they go from bar to bar the young man tells the story of the great love of his life, of how in the midst of their rapture the woman inexplicably disappeared, and of how he is now driving across Europe in a desperate attempt to find her. After they part in the pre-dawn light the old man returns to his rooms and finds himself beset by questions. Why can he not forget this young man? Who was the woman he was with and why did she leave him? These questions lead him back through his own life, from pre- and post-war Poland, to his membership of the Communist Party and his own life-altering love affair with a woman he met in Berlin and then ran away with to the sand dunes of the Baltic coast until she, too, left him without explanation. Through the years that followed he wandered the world trying to escape from the memory of her. Now, back in a small town in Poland, he begins to assemble stories both from his own past and that of the young man and the woman he loved and lost until he finds himself on an unexpected quest. Light traverses Europe and parts of America, the history of physics and political changes in Central Europe. It is about love and ruin, East and West, friendship and betrayal, the search for certainty and the consequent disillusionment. It is, too, about the making of stories and how they can lead, inadvertently, to revelation.

On Golf

A wonderful new addition to the Yellow Jersey Shorts series - an affecting memoir of one man's obsession with the arcane mysteries of the game of golf. Destined to become a classic

Timothy O'Grady is the author of two novels and two works of non-fiction. He lives in Valencia.

Weather, hazards, poor coordination, erratic biorhythms, hangovers, an unruly mind and statistical improbability - these are just a few of the obstacles to hitting a pure golf shot. Che Guevara, Alice Cooper, Dennis Hopper, and Tiger Woods have all struggled with the above to a greater or lesser degree. And, since being initiated as a child into the arcane mysteries of the game of golf, Timothy O'Grady too has carried in his mind an obsession with the sport, shrugging off its social unacceptability and embracing its history, its literature and his own private battle with the club.   For O'Grady, the obsession has, at times, been all-consuming and On Golf is structured around a personal history - how his father played and taught him, how the game dominated his teenage years, and how father and son continued to talk manically about the game even as the older man lay fading away in the bed in which he would die. But O'Grady also discusses the rich literature of golf, from Tobias Smollett to P. G. Wodehouse, and tells us of the terrifying and glorious occasion when he got to play a round with Arnold Palmer. On Golf is the work of a great writer and a good golfer. Timothy O'Grady still dreams that he may one day become a truly fine player but in the meantime he has given us a book which beautifully describes his love affair with the game and goes to the root of the obsession that captivates so many.

Timothy O'Grady

A Journey in America

In 1973, aged twenty-two, Timothy O'Grady left America. For the next thirty years he lived in and wrote about Europe. As he did, the American counter-culture crashed, Ronald Reagan came and went, wars were declared and the country was attacked by air. Much of the world began to look at America in a new way, wondering what had happened to it and where it was going. Among them was Timothy O'Grady, and he decided to go back and investigate.<br/>
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He went out onto the American road, travelling over fifteen thousand miles through thirty-five states. He met academics, the homeless, war veterans, political activists, New Orleans rappers, billionaires, novelists and a Ku Klux Klansman. In every bar he stopped in, it seemed, there was a story of American life to be heard.

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