The Women Behind the Door

He's a comic genius

Spectator

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

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

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

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives

Sunday Times

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

Roddy Doyle has done the impossible - he has made Paula Spencer even more unforgettable the second time round

The Times

Gloriously triumphant... Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation

Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

Mr Doyle has made his own the gritty world of modern Dublin

New York 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!

[Paula has] a wild and hilarious narrative voice… [and] a gloriously sardonic sense of humour. The book deals with hard times and dark matters, but there’s always light in the writing

Guardian

Lesser novelists would ‘humanise’ Paula with virtue and much curiosity. But the protagonist Doyle gives us is as proud, inane and flawed as she is compassionate, witty and dignified

Literary Review

Paula Spencer [is Doyle’s] endlessly resilient, thoughtful and entirely fictional protagonist… [The Women Behind the Door] is possibly Doyle’s most mature, and certainly his most structurally sophisticated [book]

The Times

Roddy Doyle’s new novel might be the best thing he has written… it’s full of energy and life, it completes a trilogy to read and reread, and it shows us finally, joyously, how, whatever life throws at Paula Spencer, "she’ll manage. She always has."

Observer

A masterclass in dialogue from the bard of the bog ordinary

Saga

Doyle has long been praised for his use of vernacular, dialect and slang: talk is at the heart of his work and this book is no exception, whether via the interiority of thought or the audible babble of jokes, jeers, recrimination, fury

Financial Times

The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are…such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising

Washington Post

This is an incredibly affecting third act that brilliantly captures Paula's internal weather, a light-and-shade of devastation and normality... The past will never be past for Paula, but as the reckonings come, it is beginning to be accommodated at last.

Daily Mail

The Booker-winning author brings his storytelling genius to a tale about a family in crisis

iNews

I don't often cry at books – music is a different matter – but Roddy Doyle did a number on me with The Women Behind the Door this year. He had just made me laugh when suddenly there was a line...that made me well up

John Self, Irish Times

Roddy Doyle – the virtuoso of the inner monologue. The author’s genius takes wing in this novel… The novel remains deep inside Paula’s mind – and brilliantly so. I’m willing to bet that what goes on in most of our heads is beautifully captured here

The Times

An emotional and moving portrayal of life shaped by past trauma and domestic violence. Doyle’s ability to capture the subtleties of human emotions and relationships is great. His dialogue is spot-on, it’s funny and moving... I loved it

Elaine Feeney

Genuinely devastating... [Paula is] one of Doyle's most gratifyingly human characters yet. She is full to brim of fierce love... Roddy Doyle is the undisputed master of dialogue. The exchanges between his female characters are a delight, packed tight with authenticity and a humour they wear lightly

Irish Independent