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A brilliantly warm and witty portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heartrending short stories, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
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 written mostly 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.
"Humor of every shade, from near-slapstick to keen satire, prevents the collection's moments of emotional insight from congealing into sentimentality. And Dublin itself, the broad streets and the even broader range of its natives' speech—so pungent and quick—has rarely been so deftly captured. A moving and quick-witted portrait of Dublin lives under lockdown." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[An] accomplished collection...A master of dialogue—whether strained, deceptive, or free-flowing—Doyle has a keen eye for the interconnectedness and the criticality of communication, which makes these stories shimmer. Doyle's raw portrayal of living and loving under lockdown has a deep resonance." - Publishers Weekly
"These 10 simmering, inward-looking tales, set in Ireland in the midst of lockdown, turn the roiling psychic turmoil induced by the pandemic into a timely and yet timeless form of domestic drama...[A]mid the slow disintegration and abrupt cessation of old lives, there is always the sustaining black humor that is ever at the heart of Doyle's fiction." - Booklist
"There is an immediacy in 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, however clumsily expressed...more than anything, these stories are about the vital importance of communicating with one another before it's too late." - The Guardian (UK)
"Full of drama and pathos—bringing us humor and love amid the gloom...Roddy Doyle, the undisputed laureate of ordinary lives, has just delivered a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilized us during the dog days of Covid...Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers. Silver linings have been hard to find lately, but in Life Without Children Doyle has given us just that." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"Doyle's superb stories, set in the pandemic, pinpoint the joys and sorrows of people in their 60s...Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers...The wisdom in Doyle's writing is the wisdom of this acknowledgment: that to wish to be free of everything that makes one prey to sentimentality and cliché (the love of one's children chief among them) is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible." - The Telegraph (UK)
This information about Life Without Children was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Mark Nixon
Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of ten acclaimed novels, including The Commitments, The Van (a finalist for the Booker Prize), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner of the Booker Prize), The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, The Guts and most recently, Love. Doyle has also written several collections of stories, as well as Two Pints, Two More Pints and Two for the Road, and several works for children and young adults including the Rover novels. He lives in Dublin.
When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.
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