Continuing the psychologically acute and richly emotional story of Paula Spencer, Doyle's beautifully wrought novel finds mother and daughter untangling the ghosts of the past in order to forge a brighter future.
At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children, now with families and petty dramas the likes of which Paula could only have hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.
That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, “a success” – Nicola is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. Over the next few days, as Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter find themselves untangling anecdotes, jokes, memory and revelation to confront the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other.
The next sequence in the life of Roddy Doyle’s quietly remarkable, ever-memorable Paula Spencer, The Women Behind the Door is a delicately devastating portrait of shame and the inescapable shadow it casts over families.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787334908
Number of pages: 272
Dimensions: 242 x 162 x 26 mm
Weight: 470 g
Language: English
The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives - Sunday Times
Mr Doyle has made his own the gritty world of modern Dublin - New York Times
Gloriously triumphant... Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation - Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity
Roddy Doyle has done the impossible - he has made Paula Spencer even more unforgettable the second time round - The Times
While recognising that we have all sat po-faced through novels which other people have assured us were hilarious... All I can say is that The Snapper creased me up - Jonathan Coe, author of What A Carve Up!
He's a comic genius - Spectator
Roddy Doyle has never lacked ambition, writing complex novels that appear straightforward: heavy on the dialogue, simple in the language, deep in the lives of ordinary working people - The Times
Roddy Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers... Doyle does not abhor sentimentality. A single sentence, a brief exchange, can raise a laugh and a lump in the throat... The wisdom in Doyle’s writing is the wisdom of this acknowledgement: that to wish to be free of everything that makes one prey to sentimentality and cliché is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible - Telegraph
Doyle has facility for creating characters out of thin air and making them stick. Not to mention the sly humor, the ability to hew to the fine line between pathos and bathos and write unsentimentally about sad people and situations, and the gift for quicksilver dialogue that can sound like a poetic form of vernacular speech... When you put these together with Doyle’s broad range, you’re left feeling close to dazzled... He imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection - New York Times
Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue... And there is beauty and compassion in Mr Doyle's sculpted, spare writing. Among all the banter and gags he manages to articulate feelings that are rarely expressed so fittingly - Economist
The Eights
The Divorce
The Daisy Chain Flower Shop
By Your Side
The Long Shoe
Heated Rivalry
Wild Dark Shore
The Housemaid
When the Cranes Fly South
The Things We Never Say
Yesteryear
The Impossible Fortune
Taiwan Travelogue
Paula, the woman who walked into doors, is back. She's sixty-six now, sober, a grandmother, a survivor, though still battling her past too.
As always with Dolye the writing style is direct, conversational, the...
More
Pre-approved to read and review the new Roddy Doyle novel, “The Women Behind the Door,” I ordered a previous book of his, “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,” which also features Paula Spencer. As an alcoholic and... More
There are characters that are synonymous with their authors, and Paula Spencer is Roddy Doyle's Galatea, a woman who, by this third book, has lived many lives and is more than ready to relax into the person she... More
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?
