Roddy Doyle

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BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: Description:
"It is 1968.. Paddy Clarke is ten years old, breathless with discovery.. He reads with a child's voraciousness, collecting facts the way adults collect grey hairs and parking tickets.. Doyle captures the speech patterns of childhood brilliantly, the weird logic of the incessant questions, the non-sequturs and wonderments... Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss.. This is one of the most compelling novels I've read in ages, a triumph of style and perception.." - Joseph O'Connor - Irish Times..

Title: The Snapper: Description:
Funny book by the bestselling author - contains swearing

Title: The Woman Who Walked Into Doors: Description:
By the author of ""Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha"", winner of the 1993 Booker Prize, this is the life history of Paula Spencer - her contented childhood, her romance with Charlo, and her sad marriage. It is the story of a working class woman in her 30s who is both vulnerable and strong.

Title: Oh, Play That Thing: Description:
This sprawling tale follows Henry Smart, hero of A Star called Henry, to the USA, where he assumes many aliases and wins a number of pliant women to support him. He teams up with Louis Armstrong. Don't want to spoil your enjoyment by giving any more away!

Title: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: Description:
winner of the booker prize 1993

Title: A Star Called Henry: Description:
The habit of murder becomes a hard one to break; the hero of Roddy Doyle's novel of the Irish War of Independence, like his father before him, kills to order and kills in cold blood. Where his father was simply the one-legged bouncer at a brothel, whose employers used him for any killing that needs to be done, Henry has motives. Growing up on the street, taught his letters by James Connolly, he believes in not just Irish freedom, but workers' revolution. He learns the hard way that his pious middle-class masters do not have this in mind. A Star Called Henry--passionate, angry, darkly and wildly comic--has something in it to offend everybody. His stirring, deeply anti-romantic, account of the siege of the Dublin Post Office during the Easter Rising is remarkable, but hardly less so is his account of life on the Dublin docks, or Henry's treks around the countryside as one of Michael Collins' hard men, teaching guerrilla warfare to dairy farmers and clerks. The love affair between Henry and his equally blood-thirsty teacher and wife Miss O'Shea is sweet and touching. The first volume of a trilogy, this is a radical departure for Doyle, and a stunning success. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

Title: The Barrytown Trilogy:: Description:
Together in one volume, this book contains Roddy Doyle's trilogy about the Rabbitte family of Barrytown, north Dublin. "The Commitments", "The Snapper" and "The Van", which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize.

Title: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: Description:
In Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an Irish lad named Paddy rampages through the streets of Barrytown with a pack of like-minded hooligans, playing cowboys and Indians, etching their names in wet concrete, and setting fires. Roddy Doyle has captured the sensations and speech patterns of preadolescents with consummate skill, and managed to do so without resorting to sentimentality. Paddy Clarke and his friends are not bad boys; they're just a little bit restless. They're always taking sides, bullying each other, and secretly wishing they didn't have to. All they want is for something--anything--to happen. Throughout the novel, Paddy teeters on the nervous verge of adolescence. In one scene, Paddy tries to make his little brother's hot water bottle explode, but gives up after stomping on it just one time: "I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen." Paddy Clarke senses that his world is about to change forever--and not necessarily for the better. When he realizes that his parents' marriage is falling apart, Paddy stays up all night listening, half-believing that his vigil will ward off further fighting. It doesn't work, but it is sweet and sad that he believes it might. Paddy's logic may be fuzzy, but his heart is in the right place. --Jill Marquis

Title: A Star Called Henry (the Last Roundup): Description:
Born in the Dublin slums of 1901, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing and begging, often cold and always hungry, but a prince of the streets. By Easter Monday, 1916, he's fourteen years old and already six-foot-two, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a Republican legend - one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike. From the Publisher 'Doyle at his best- his portrait of turn-of-the-century Dublin's dark side is masterful. There is a Dickensian richness to language and character' The Times About the Author Roddy Doyle:Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of six acclaimed novels. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Excerpted from A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. My mother looked up at the stars. There were plenty of them up there. She lifted her hand. It swayed as she chose one. Her finger pointed. There's my little Henry up there. Look it. I looked, her other little Henry sitting beside her on the step. I looked up and hated him. She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me. And poor Mother. She sat on that step and other crumbling steps and watched her other babies joining Henry. Little Gracie, Lil, Victor, another little Victor. The ones I remember. There were others, and early others sent to Limbo; they came and went before they could be named. God took them all. He needed them all up there to light the night. He left her plenty, though. The ugly ones, the noisy ones, the ones He didn't want - the ones that would never stay fed. Poor Mother. She wasn't much more than twenty when she gazed up at little twinkling Henry but she was already old, already decomposing, ruined beyond repair, good for some more babies, then finished. Poor Mammy. Her own mother was a leathery old witch, but was probably less than forty. She poked me, as if to prove that I was there. You're big, she said. She was accusing me, weighing me, planning to take some of me back. Always wrapped in her black shawl, she always smelt of rotten meat and herrings - it was a sweat on her. Always with a book under the shawl, the complete works of Shakespeare or something by Tolstoy. Nash was her name but I don't know what she called herself before she married her dead husband. She'd no Christian name that I ever heard. Granny Nash was all she ever was. I don't know where she came from; I don't remember an accent. Wrapped in her sweating black shawl, she could have crept out of any century. She might have walked from Roscommon or Clare, pushed on by the stench of the blight, walked across the country till she saw the stone-eating smoke that lay over the piled, sagging fever-nests that made our beautiful city, walked in along the river, deeper and deeper, into the filth and shit, the noise and the money. A young country girl, never kissed, never touched, she was scared, she was thrilled. She turned around and back around and saw the four corners of hell. Her heart cried for Leitrim but her tits sang for Dublin. She got down on her back and yelled at the sailors to form a queue. Frenchmen, Danes, Chinamen, the Yanks. I don't know. A young country girl, a waif, just a child, aching for food. She'd left her family dead in a ditch, their chops green with grass juice, their bellies set to explode in the noonday sun. I don't know any of this. She might have been Dublin-bred. Or she might have been foreign. A workhouse orphan, a nun gone wrong. Transported from Australia, too ugly and bad for Van Diemen's Land. I don't know. She'd become a witch by the time I saw her. Always with her head in a book, looking for spells. She shoved her face forward with ancient certainty, knew every thought behind my eyes. She knew how far evil could drop. She stared at me with her cannibal's eyes and I had to dash down to the privy. Her eyes slammed the door after me. And what do I know about poor Mother? Precious little. I know that she was Melody Nash. A beautiful name, promising so much. I know that she was born in Dublin and that she lived on Bolton Street. She worked in Mitchell's rosary bead factory on Marlborough Street. They made the beads out of cows' horns. All day, six days a week, sweating, going blind for God and Mitchell. Putting the holes in the beads for Jesus. Hands bleeding, eyes itching. Before she walked into my father. Melody Nash. I think of the name and I don't see my mother. Melody melody. She skips, she laughs, her black eyes shine happy. Her blue-black hair dances, her feet lick the cobbles. Her teacher is fond of her, she's a fast learner. She's quick at the adding, her letters curl beautifully. She has a great future, she'll marry a big noise. She'll have good meat each day and a house with a jacks. Out of the way, here comes melody Melody, out of the way, here comes melody Melody. What age was she when she learnt the truth, when she found out that her life would have no music? The name was a lie, a spell the witch put on her. She was twelve when she walked into Mitchell's bead factory and she was sixteen when she walked into my father. Four years in between, squinting, counting, shredding her hands, in a black hole making beads. Melody melody rosary beads. They sang as they worked. Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me. Mitchell wanted them to pray. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee. Was she gorgeous? Did her white teeth gleam as she lifted her head with the other girls? Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song. The woman on the step had no teeth, nothing gleamed. Like me, she was never a child. There were no children in Dublin. Promises weren't kept in the slums. She was never beautiful.

Title: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: Description:
Very funny, understanding about the triumphs and indignities of family life, brave in touching upon the raw nerves of the male psche. Unputdownable.