Life Without Children

A quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid… Silver linings have been hard to find lately, but in Life Without Children Doyle has given us just that * Sunday Times *[A] gem of a collection… Roddy Doyle’s greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers, but he has lately put his gifts to use in painting a picture of characters in…their “third age”. * Daily Telegraph *Quietly devastating… Doyle’s clipped, plain dialogue shivers with emotion. * Financial Times *Life Without Children…displays Doyle’s remarkable talent for conveying the strongest of emotions in the simplest of words and the shortest of sentences… It bristles with quietly sharp insights into the shape of a human life. * Reader’s Digest *There is an immediacy to 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. * Observer *Moving…[and] beautiful in its brevity. * Daily Mail *A treat for fans of the Booker Prize-winning Irish author… the darkness of the stories, Doyle’s lyrical style of wit, passion, and occasional obscene outbursts, shine through… wonderfully uplifting. * UK Press Syndication *As always, Doyle has a great ear for the cadences of Dublin speech, finding humour in even the bleakest situations. * Tablet *

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of twelve acclaimed novels including The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van and Smile, two collections of short stories, and Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

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