Showing results by author "Roddy Doyle" in All Categories

Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone. In these ten beautifully moving short stories written mostly over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times.

Patrick Clarke is a 10-year-old boy trying to make sense of his world. He is confused. His Ma and Da fight too much. School seems like a joke. And love, though it has a good reputation, seems pretty cruel. Paddy sees everything, but has trouble understanding it all. His story is an exuberant romp through the triumphs, indignities, and troublemaking detours of an Irish childhood.

Paula Spencer is a 39-year-old working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Paula recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her feeling powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable.

Narrated by Stephen Hogan and introduced by Roy Keane. In an 18-year playing career for Cobh Ramblers, Nottingham Forest, and Manchester United (under Sir Alex Ferguson) and Celtic, Roy Keane dominated every midfield he led to glory. Aggressive and highly competitive, his attitude helped him to excel as captain of Manchester United from 1997 until his departure in 2005.

In this cornucopia of an anthology, you will find essays by some of the world's most beloved novelists, nonfiction writers, essayists and poets. You will see books taking flight in flocks, migrating around the world, landing in people's hearts and changing them for a day or a year or a lifetime. You will see books sparking wonder or anger; throwing open windows into other languages, other cultures, other minds; causing people to fall in love or to fight for what is right.

At sixty-six, Paula Spencer—mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor—has finally started to live her life. She has a job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, her boyfriend Joe is a text away when she needs him, and her four children now have the healthy families and petty dramas that Paula could have only hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside. That is until her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day.

Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's 48th birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Having outlived an abusive husband and father, Paula and her four children are now struggling to live their adult lives, with two of the kids balancing their own addictions. Paula rebuilds her life slowly. As she goes about her daily routine working as a cleaning woman, and cooking for her two children at home, she re-establishes connections with her two sisters, her mother, and grandchildren, expanding her world.

Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica.

If adults are mean to children, they get the Giggler Treatment. It's smelly. It's squishy. And it sticks to your shoe ... Mr Mack’s dog, Rover, sells his own poo to ‘the Gigglers,’ a group of children who take revenge on any adult who treats children unfairly… by making the unsuspecting adults step in poo!

Paddy Clarke is ten years old. Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown, north Dublin. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke has a brother called Francis, but Paddy calls him Sinbad and hates him because that's the rule. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee.

Brilliant is about humor in the face of hard times, a perfect story for families to listen to together, by an author whose keen sense of human frailty and resilience has resulted in many beloved books for adults and children.

Dublin, 1968. Der zehnjährige Paddy Clarke langweilt sich in der Schule und vertreibt sich die Zeit mit Freunden, zieht durch die Straßen, treibt Unfug oder ärgert seinen kleinen Bruder. Abends sitzt er vor dem Fernseher und knabbert Chips. Doch Paddy lebt nicht in einer heilen Welt: Sein Vater ist dem Alkohol verfallen und streitet immer häufiger mit seiner Mutter, wird sogar handgreiflich. Paddys Versuche, den Hausfrieden zu wahren, zu schlichten und die Eskalation abzuwenden, gelingen nicht und er muss wohl oder übel erwachsen werden. Kleiner Junge trifft große Welt.

Paula O'Leary is hugely popular with the boys from her working-class Dublin neighbourhood. But it is the charming Charlo Spencer who finally gets her. Yet after their honeymoon, everything changes. When Charlo first strikes her, she is stunned. But as his violent outbursts develop from slaps and bruises to broken fingers and knocked-out teeth, she gradually loses all self-respect, denying how bleak things are and drinking heavily.

Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel "The Lips" Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from paris hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?

Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle shines with this epic conclusion to the saga of his indomitable Irish rebel Henry Smart. Chronicling nearly 25 years of history, The Dead Republic finds Smart working closely with, then violently severing ties to, legendary Hollywood director John Ford and eventually returning to Ireland in the 1950s. Desiring a quiet retired life in a small village north of Dublin, his life is further thrown into tumult by IRA uprisings and a surprising reunion with a woman who may just be his long-lost wife.

Fifteen of Ireland's finest writers collaborated on this murder mystery that involves searching for the only manuscript of an unpublished novel by James Joyce. Raucous, raunchy, and completely hilarious, Yeats Is Dead! is a diabolically entertaining mulligan stew of a novel. James Joyce would be proud.

In the 1980s Jimmy Rabbitte formed the Commitments, a ragtag, blue-collar collective of Irish youths determined to bring the soul music stylings of James Brown and Percy Sledge to Dublin. Time proves a great equalizer for Jimmy as he’s now approaching 50 with a loving wife, four kids, and a recent cancer diagnosis that leaves him feeling shattered and frightened. Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle - his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay for their resurrected albums.

Roddy Doyle has earned a devoted following for his wry wit, his uncanny ear, and his ability to fully capture the hearts of his characters. Bullfighting, his second collection of stories, offers a series of bittersweet takes on men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Moving from classrooms to local pubs to bullrings, these tales feature an array of men taking stock and reliving past glories, each concerned with loss in different ways.

Drinking pals back in their Dublin days, Davy rarely sees Joe for a pint anymore - maybe one or two when Davy’s over from England to check in on his elderly father. But tonight, one pint will turn to three and then five as Joe recounts a secret, leading the two men on a bender back to the haunts of their youth. Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or he should - she was the girl of their dreams all those years ago, the girl with the cello in George’s Pub.