Overview

A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending and uplifting short stories. 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, Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet.

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9781432896164

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Reviews

PRAISE FOR LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN Roddy Doyle, the undisputed laureate of ordinary lives, has just delivered a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid. . . . None of us ever thought we would have to live through a global pandemic, and reflections on that stark reality were always going to be gloomy, but Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasising the redemptive power of humour, love and the kindness of strangers. Silver linings have been hard to find lately, but in Life Without Children Doyle has given us just that. --The Times Roddy Doyle's superb stories, set in the pandemic, pinpoint the joys and sorrows of people in their 60s. --The Telegraph Written in [Doyle's] trademark vernacular, where . . . expansive emotions are implied in the gaps between the words spoken. . . . [B]eautiful in its brevity. --Daily Mail Roddy Doyle's superb stories, set in the pandemic, pinpoint the joys and sorrows of people in their sixties. . . . [G]em of a collection. --The Daily Telegraph (Australia) Roddy Doyle's slim new short story collection, Life Without Children . . . [recalls] the looping lives in James Joyce's Dubliners; although here, there are moments of hope, reconciliation, and even sentimentality. . . . Doyle's clipped, plain dialogue shivers with emotion. --Financial Times There is an immediacy in the stories in Life Without Children, an emotional charge that comes with writing in real time, and an optimism too. In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection, however clumsily expressed . . . more than anything, these stories are about the vital importance of communicating with one another before it's too late. --The Guardian Doyle's superb stories, set in the pandemic, pinpoint the joys and sorrows of people in their 60s . . . 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 cliche (the love of one's children chief among them) is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible. --The Telegraph PRAISE FOR RODDY DOYLE Doyle [is] the master of dialogue . . . He's a craftsman, always trying to raise the level of his work. . . . Doyle's stories of difficult, messy working-class life and the quality of his dialogue . . . have struck a chord with readers around the world. --The Globe and Mail Doyle's remarkable strength as a writer includes his ability to take the hardscrabble realities of Irish life, highlight its casual cruelties and kindnesses, inject the country's trademark black humour, and weave it all into a coherent tale that resonates to readers elsewhere. --Maclean's In terms of contemporary Irish literature, nobody has turned it inside out as profoundly as Roddy Doyle; he's one of our greats. --Colum McCann, The New York Times Doyle is a stellar storyteller. . . . Doyle exhibits a peerless ear for cynicism as he grapples with the violence and farce of Irish history. --Publishers Weekly A gifted chronicler of working-class Irish life, with all of its attendant ugliness, conflict and moments of unexpected beauty. . . . Doyle has always had an eye for heartbreaking detail and an ear for blunt, colloquial, often profane rhythms of everyday speech and thought. --The Washington Post

Author Information

RODDY DOYLE was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of ten acclaimed novels, including The Commitments, The Van (a finalist for the Booker Prize), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner of the Booker Prize), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, The Guts and, most recently, Love. Doyle has also written several collections of stories, as well as Two Pints, Two More Pints and Two for the Road, and several works for children and young adults including the Rover novels. He lives in Dublin.

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