Minor Monuments

Minor Monuments is a collection of essays about family, memory, and music. Mostly set in the rural Irish midlands, on a small family farm not far from the river Shannon. This book tracks the final years of Maleney's grandfather's life, and looks at his experience with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the experiences of the people closest to him.

Using his grandfather's memory loss as a spur, the essays ask what it means to call a place home how we establish ourselves in a place, and how we record our experiences of a place.

The nature of familial and social bonds, the way a relationship is altered by observing and recording it, the influence of tradition and history, the question of belonging - these are the questions which come up again and again.

Using episodes from his own life, and drawing on the works of artists like Pat Collins, Seamus Heaney, John Berger and Brian Eno, Maleney examines how certain ways of listening and looking might bring us closer to each other, or keep us apart.

Minor Monuments is a thought provoking and quietly devastating meditation on family, and how even the smallest story is no minor event.