At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, 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. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.

That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, 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, they find themselves embracing the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other.

‘His best yet?full of energy and life’ OBSERVER

‘Reading [Paula Spencer’s] voice for the first time sent a pang of recognition through me, followed by love’ ANNE ENRIGHT

‘Storytelling genius’ i PAPER

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2024

‘The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives’
SUNDAY TIMES

‘Brilliant?passionate, funny and humane’
DAVID NICHOLLS

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.

‘Paula Spencer is a hymn to female generosity; the ordinary, discardable kind that keeps the world turning. Reading her voice for the first time sent a pang of recognition through me, followed by love’
ANNE ENRIGHT

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.

‘Life Without Children is boldly exhilarating, with its revelations of quiet love and the sheer charm of the characters’ voices’ Sunday Times

‘Quietly devastating…shivers with emotion’ Financial Times

‘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’ Observer

‘Moving…and beautiful’ Daily Mail

A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending 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 mostly written over the last year, 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.

‘Roddy Doyle is an absolute genius’ J.K. Rowling

‘The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives’ The Times

One summer’s evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.

As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them – the pubs, the parties, the broken hearts and bungled affairs – the men find themselves face-to-face with the realities of friendship.

In 2012, Roddy Doyle showed us the world anew: through the back-and-forth of two Dublin pub-dwellers. They chewed the fat, set the world to rights, slagged each other unmercifully. And along the way, they chased the ebb and flow and stupidity of the year right to the bottom of their pints.

Today, they’re still at it – even over Zoom, if needs be. Collected for the first time, here is almost a decade’s worth of elections and referendums, births and deaths, football, financial crashes, pandemics and the philosophical questions of life, as told through the wit and warmth of Roddy Doyle’s comic genius.

Includes: Two Pints, Two More Pints, Two for the Road – and, for the first time in print, Two Pints: The Play and The Zoom Pints

Charlie is a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who’s realised that he’s been a woman all along ?

Compiled here for the first time is a whole year’s worth of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious series for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man – funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered – trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don’t give out first).

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE FOR COMIC WRITING 2019

‘A delight from start to finish’ Irish Mail on Sunday

At least, that’s what they heard their granny say. And she says it’s taken Dublin’s funny bone too.

As Uncle Ben’s Dublin business fails, it’s clear to Gloria and Rayzer that something is wrong. He just isn’t his usual cheerful self. So when the children overhear their granny saying that the Black Dog has settled on Ben’s back and he won’t be OK until it’s gone, they decide they’re going to get rid of it. Gathering all their courage the children set out on a midnight quest to hunt down the Black Dog and chase it away.

Gloria and Rayzer are really brave, but the black dog is really scary – and soon they realize that they can’t fight it alone. Before long loads of other children are searching for it too, because the Black Dog is hounding lots of Dublin’s adults. Together – and with the help of magical animals, birds and rodents – the children manage to corner the Black Dog . . . but will they have the courage and cleverness to destroy the frightening creature?

Roddy Doyle’s ‘brilliant’ Brilliant is a wonderful, heartwarming middle grade tale of friendship and family.

Jimmy Rabbitte is back.

The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids … and bowel cancer. He isn’t dying, he thinks, but he might be.

Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments – Outspan, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever.

This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life.

Includes the short story Jimmy Jazz