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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.

The next sequence in the life of Roddy Doyle’s quietly remarkable, ever-memorable Paula Spencer, The Women Behind the Door is a delicately devastating portrait of shame and the inescapable shadow it casts over families.

‘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

Publisher Review

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives * Sunday Times * Mr Doyle has made his own the gritty world of modern Dublin * New York Times * Gloriously triumphant... Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation -- Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity Roddy Doyle has done the impossible - he has made Paula Spencer even more unforgettable the second time round * The Times * While recognising that we have all sat po-faced through novels which other people have assured us were hilarious... All I can say is that The Snapper creased me up -- Jonathan Coe, author of What A Carve Up! He's a comic genius * Spectator * Roddy Doyle has never lacked ambition, writing complex novels that appear straightforward: heavy on the dialogue, simple in the language, deep in the lives of ordinary working people * The Times * Roddy Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers... Doyle does not abhor sentimentality. A single sentence, a brief exchange, can raise a laugh and a lump in the throat... The wisdom in Doyle's writing is the wisdom of this acknowledgement: that to wish to be free of everything that makes one prey to sentimentality and cliche is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible * Telegraph * Doyle has facility for creating characters out of thin air and making them stick. Not to mention the sly humor, the ability to hew to the fine line between pathos and bathos and write unsentimentally about sad people and situations, and the gift for quicksilver dialogue that can sound like a poetic form of vernacular speech... When you put these together with Doyle's broad range, you're left feeling close to dazzled... He imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection * New York Times * Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue... And there is beauty and compassion in Mr Doyle's sculpted, spare writing. Among all the banter and gags he manages to articulate feelings that are rarely expressed so fittingly * Economist *