The Women Behind the Door

Full of energy and life, a sparkling novel about family, memory, and a mother and daughter starting all over again - from the Booker Prize-winner.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.

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives Sunday 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
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
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
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
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
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
The Booker-winning author brings his storytelling genius to a tale about a family in crisis iNews
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
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

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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