Life Without Children: Stories Hardcover – February 22, 2022 by Roddy Doyle

Description

Author: Doyle Roddy

Color: Sky/Pale blue

Package Dimensions: 12x210x327

Number Of Pages: 192

Release Date: 22-02-2022

Details: Product Description
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.
Review
Advance praise for Life Without Children:
“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

“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

“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 . . . 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 cliché (the love of one’s children chief among them) is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible.”
—The Telegraph
About the Author
Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of eleven 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,
Smile, 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.