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Life Without Children

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781529115024

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 15mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 200g

  • RRP: £9.99

Life Without Children

  • Stories

RELEASED 06/10/2022

A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending short stories

Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone.

In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret.

Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet.

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9781529115024

  • Length: 192  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 15mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 200g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • 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".

    Nikhil Krishnan, Daily Telegraph

  • Moving...[and] beautiful in its brevity.

    Eithne Farry, Daily Mail

  • Quietly devastating... Doyle's clipped, plain dialogue shivers with emotion.

    Philip Womack, 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.

    James Walton, Reader's Digest

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About the Author

Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of eleven 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.

Roddy Doyle

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Competitions

Win a copy of Love by Roddy Doyle and a year's subscription to Beer52
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Podcasts

Roddy Doyle on school days, pubs and the perfect title

Dublin-born Roddy Doyle joins Alex Clark to discuss his new book, Smile, and the real life experiences that influenced his writing
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Features

Roddy Doyle Q&A

In middle age, the hero of Roddy Doyle's Smile is forced to confront childhood memories of abuse by the Christian Brothers who taught him. Doyle explains why he set out to write "something that could shock"

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