The Women Behind the Door
by Roddy Doyle
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Pub Date 12 Sep 2024 | Archive Date 12 Oct 2024
Random House UK, Vintage | Jonathan Cape
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Description
Booker-Prize winner Roddy Doyle’s spectacular return to his iconic heroine, Paula Spencer
‘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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781787334908 |
| PRICE | £20.00 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 272 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Kev M, Reviewer
I lost touch with Roddy Doyle’s books after The Guts ten years ago. I have to say this is a massive return to form, or maybe all the books I have missed in the last decade have been up to this standard. Either way, Doyle has returned to Paula Spencer - the protagonist of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and the eponymous sequel.
In this book, Paula is in her late sixties. She has a great group of friends, a dull (but dependable and decent) man in her life and a bunch of children - some of whom are distant, one (Nicola) considers herself damaged by Paula’s marriage. Against the backdrop of COVID, cost of living and modern day Dublin; things come to a head.
It’s a powerful cocktail and those who love Doyle’s dialogue driven style can see it here. He’s always in control of using events in a bigger story about coming to terms with your own child, let alone your past. And although readers may be familiar with what happened to Paula in the previous two novels, it stands alone as a funny, brutal, warm, touching read.
In this book, Paula reads Marian Keyes’ novel The Break. Perhaps he’s impishly nodding at a universe where both novelist and novel are fictional and real at the same time. Either way, this puts Doyle alongside Keyes and Enright at the top table of Irish literature.
It’s published by Random House on 12th September and I thank them for a preview copy. #thewomenbehindthedoor
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