The Woman Who Walked into Doors
by Roddy Doyle
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Roddy Doyle follows Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of the Booker Prize, and The Commitments with another remarkable book that readers will find funny, sexy, and sad. He takes an unflinching look at the life of Paula Spencer as she struggles to regain her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable.
The Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha draws a portrait of a working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and her own alcoholism. Reprint. NYT.
The Barrytown Trilogy
by Roddy Doyle
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
The bestselling author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha presents a one-volume edition of his celebrated trio of novels. Doyle's comic novels, The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, depict the daily life and times of the Rabbitte family in working-class Dublin.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
by Roddy Doyle
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
In Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they're just a little bit restless. They're always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn't have to. All they want is for something--anything--to happen.
Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make his little brother's hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping on it just one time: "I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen." Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to change forever--and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes that his parents' marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward off further fighting. It doesn't work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy's logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. --Jill Marquis
Life as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Irish boy, Patrick Clarke, is a poignant voyage through a bewildering, ever-changing world of family, friends, dreams, and growing up. Winner of the Booker Prize. Reprint. Tour.
The Giggler Treatment
by Roddy Doyle
from Arthur A. Levine Books
What, you might well ask, is the Giggler Treatment? Better yet, what precisely is a Giggler? You won't find out until chapter 6 of Roddy Doyle's The Giggler Treatment, but for those of you who can't wait, here's the answer: Gigglers are "baby-sized and furry. Their fur changes color as they move." Their main occupation in life is to look after children and to punish adults who are mean or unfair to them. And the Treatment? Four words: "Poo on the shoe."
The Gigglers have always been there. Since the first dog did its first poo. Since the first caveman grunted at his first cavechild. He stomped out of the cave, straight onto a huge lump of prehistoric poo.In his first children's book, Roddy Doyle, prize-winning author of such adult fare as Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Barrytown Trilogy, and A Star Called Henry, gives free literary rein to his inner child. The result may surprise his older readers, but is guaranteed to please the Captain Underpants set with its frequent good-humored references to poo, rudies, bums, and other body parts and functions. Doyle bases his tale on a dreadful misunderstanding: Mr. Mack, a biscuit tester in a biscuit factory sends his sons to their rooms without supper for breaking a window. This piece of unfairness naturally warrants the Treatment, and so the Gigglers immediately rush next door to collect a walloping great lump of poo from a neighboring Irish wolfhound. Unfortunately, they aren't present when Mr. Mack repents. When the children later find out their father is headed into deep doo-doo, it becomes a race against time to save him from poo on the shoe.
Doyle takes this slightest of plots and piles on plenty of whimsy, from a talking dog to a race across Dublin via the Nile River and the Eiffel Tower. Chapter titles have names like "Chapter Something," "Another Chapter," and "The Chapter After the Last One"; there are frequent digressions into topics such as mountain climbing and the love life of Irish wolfhounds; the illustrations are fun; and there's an amusing glossary at the end that translates some of the Britishisms ("Plaster--Band Aid. Very useful if you are bleeding to death"). This good-natured romp through a comedic territory beloved by children (and more than a few grownups) will surely win the author whole new legions of fans. Indeed, it's highly unlikely that Mr. Doyle will ever have to worry about falling victim to the Giggler Treatment himself. (Ages 9 and older) --Petra Williams
Imagine a wonderfully rude, children's version of "It's a Wonderful Life." At the beginning of the tale we have a good man, a caring man, heading for his job as a cookie-tasterÂ…but also heading for a terrible fate (he's about to step in something smelly.) Is this an accident (no!) Who's responsible? (the Gigglers, that's who! Elfen creatures whose pranks punish wayward adults.) What did he do to deserve this (he yelled at his children unfairly, but actually this was a bit of a misunderstandingÂ….) Can the impending mess be avoided (Possibly!)
Working backward, Roddy Doyle spins the hilarious tale of Mr. Mack, his wife Billy Jean, his three children Robbie, Jimmy, and Kayla, their dog Rover (in many ways the STAR of the show) and, of course, the irrepressible, sometimes hasty, but well-meaning Gigglers.
A thoroughly silly, occasionally subversive, periodically tender, completely satisfying read.
A Star Called Henry (The Last Roundup)
by Roddy Doyle
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood." The quote is from Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up impoverished in Limerick, circa World War II. But the sentiment might just as easily have come from the fictional lips of Henry Smart, the hero of Roddy Doyle's remarkable novel of Dublin in the teens, A Star Called Henry. The son of a one-legged hit man, young Henry is the third child born but the first to live through infancy. He is also the second Henry--the first having died, and become a star in the mind of his mother.
She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me.Soon, his father has all but abandoned the growing family, and at 9 Henry is on his own, running wild in the streets, thieving to stay alive. Depressing as all this sounds, Doyle has invested his narrator with such an appetite for life, and rendered him so resolutely unsorry for himself, that it seems almost insulting to pity him.
By the time he is 14, Henry has become a soldier in the new Irish Republican Army and in one long and harrowing chapter, we view the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 from his position in the thick of it. It's not a pretty sight by any means, as the populace is divided in its support and various factions within the Republican Army threaten to splinter and annihilate one another before the British even get there. When the shooting starts, Henry aims not at the British but at the store windows across the street. "I shot and killed all that I had been denied, all the commerce and snobbery that had been mocking me and other hundreds of thousands behind glass and locks, all the injustice, unfairness and shoes--while the lads took chunks out of the military." Though the uprising is eventually crushed and the leaders executed, Henry escapes to live--and fight--another day.
In previous books such as The Barrytown Trilogy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle has established himself as one of the premiere chroniclers of modern Irish life. With A Star Called Henry, he works his singular magic on the past. What's more, this is only volume one of the Last Roundup, so it looks like we haven't seen the last of Henry Smart. And that's a very good thing, indeed. --Alix Wilber
Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Smart lives through the evolution of modern Ireland, and in this extraordinary novel he brilliantly tells his story. From his own birth and childhood on the streets of Dublin to his role as soldier (and lover) in the Irish Rebellion, Henry recounts his early years of reckless heroism and adventure.
At once an epic, a love story, and a portrait of Irish history, A Star Called Henry is a grand picaresque novel brimming with both poignant moments and comic ones, and told in a voice that is both quintessentially Irish and inimitably Roddy Doyle's.
A New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, New York Post, and Independent bestseller
A Star Called Henry--one of only four works of fiction--was chosen by the editor's of The New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven Best Books of the Year
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, Newsday, Miami Herald, Seattle Times, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution
An American Library Association Notable Book
Nominated for Best Fiction of 1999, the New Yorker Book Awards
Paula Spencer
by Roddy Doyle
from Viking Adult
“Pure, undiluted pleasure” (The Washington Post) from Booker Prize–winning author Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle Â’s beautifully wrought tale revisits the Dublin housewife-heroine of his earlier acclaimed novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Paula is now forty-seven, her abusive husband is long dead, and itÂ’s been four months and five days since sheÂ’s had a drink. She cleans offices to get by and lives from paycheck to paycheck. But as she manages to get through each day sober, she begins to piece her life back together and to resurrect her family. Told with the unmistakable wit of DoyleÂ’s unique voice, this is a redemptive tale about a brave and tenacious woman.
Wilderness
by Roddy Doyle
from Arthur A. Levine Books
A novel of mothers lost and found. Grainne's Mom disappeared years ago when her parents were divorced, and Mom moved to the U.S. Now, bafflingly, she's reappeared and wants to meet. What could she be up to?
To get out of the way of this mysterious reunion, Grainne's half-brothers, Johnny and Tom, go with their mother, Sandra, on an "adventure holiday" in Finland. But before they're more than a few days into the snowy north, the boys are separated from Sandra, taking impossible risks to save her life. WILDERNESS is part-adventure, part-family drama with a charm that's all Roddy.
The Commitments
by Roddy Doyle
from Vintage
This funky, rude, unpretentious first novel traces the short, funny, and furious career of a group of working-class Irish kids who form a band, The Commitments. Their mission: to bring soul to Dublin!
The Snapper
by Roddy Doyle
from Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sharon Rabitte is single, pregnant, and living in Dublin, and as her stomach grows, her situation elicits a wide range of responses from her family and community. By the author of The Commitments. Reprint.
The Deportees: and Other Stories
by Roddy Doyle
from Viking Adult
Eight funny and poignant stories of immigrant experience in contemporary Ireland
The eight tales in Roddy Doyle’s first-ever collection of stories have one thing in common: someone born in Ireland meets someone who has come to live there. In “Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner,” a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black man. “New Boy” describes the first day of school for a nine-year-old boy from Africa; while in “The Pram,” a terrifying ghost story, a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge’s older sisters and decides—in a new phrase she has learned—to “scare them shitless.” In “57% Irish,” a man decides to devise a test of Irishness by measuring reactions to three things: Riverdance, the song “Danny Boy,” and Robbie Keane’s goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup. And in the wonderful title story, Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed The Commitments, decides that it’s time to find a new band—a multicultural outfit that specializes not in soul music but in the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.
This is classic Roddy Doyle, full of his unmistakable wit and his acute ear for dialogue. With empathy and insight, The Deportees and Other Stories takes a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance in todayÂ’s Ireland.
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