For the past few years Roddy Doyle has been writing stories for Metro Eireann, a newspaper started by, and aimed at, immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories took a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in today's Ireland. The stories range from 'Guess Who's Coming to the Dinner', where a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex, is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black fella, to a terrifying ghost story, 'The Pram', in which a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge's older sisters and decides - in a phrase she has learnt - to 'scare them shitless'.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE FOR COMIC WRITING 2019**Meet Charlie Savage: a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who's realized that he's been a woman all along... Compiled here for the first time is a whole year's worth of Roddy Doyle's hilariousseries for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man – funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered – trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don't give out first).

A standalone short story, available as a free download. Jimmy Rabbitte hates jazz, always has. But his wife Aiofe loves it, and Jimmy loves Aiofe. So when, in attempt to convert him, she buys him two tickets for a Keith Jarrett concert he decides to take Outspan, former member of Jimmy's band The Commitments, who has come back into his life after a chance meeting in the cancer clinic. Jarrett is famous for being intolerant of any noise at all - a cough, a sneeze, a wheeze - from the audience, stopping playing and shaming the perpetrator. And Outspan's diagnosis is lung cancer, it's pretty bad, and he needs an oxygen cylinder to breathe properly. Will Outspan create havoc? Will Jimmy learn to love jazz at last?

When we first met Paula Spencer - in The Woman Who Walked into Doors - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together. Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the café, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria.

The Man Booker Prize-winning author takes the pulse of modern Ireland with a masterful new collection of stories. Roddy Doyle has earned a devoted following for his wry wit, his uncanny ear, and his ability to fully capture the hearts of his characters. Bullfighting, his second collection of stories, offers a series of bittersweet takes on men and middle-age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Moving from classrooms to local pubs to bullrings, these tales feature an array of men taking stock and reliving past glories, each concerned with loss in different ways--of their place in the world, of their power, their virility, health, and love. "Recuperation" follows a man as he sets off on his daily prescribed walk around his neighborhood, the sights triggering recollections of his family and his younger days. In "Animals," George recalls caring for his children's many pets and his heartfelt effort to spare them grief when they died or disappeared. The title story, "Bullfighting," captures the mixture of bravado and helplessness of four friends who go off to Spain on holiday. Sharply observed, funny, and moving, these thirteen stories present a new vision of contemporary Ireland, of its woes and triumphs, and middle- aged men trying to break out of the routines of their lives.

A Star Called Henry was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice for 1999, one of the Boston Globe's Best Fiction of 1999, and a New Yorker Book Awards finalist for Best Fiction 1999 A Star Called Henry was named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, Newsday, Seattle Times, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A Star Called Henry was on The New York Times extended bestseller list, and was a Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday, and New York Post bestseller.

Pat had been best friends with Joe Murphy since they were kids. But years ago they had a fight. A big one, and they haven’t spoken since --- till the day before Joe’s funeral. What? On the day before his funeral Joe would be dead, wouldn’t he? Yes, he would… Roddy Doyle’s first book for the Quick Reads programme to support adult literacy is fast, funny and just a tiny bit spooky.

Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humour, the superb evocation of childhood – but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly. Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s pub for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories too – of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

The Black Dog of Depression has descended over the adults of Dublin. Uncles are losing their businesses, dads won’t get out of bed, mothers no longer smile at their children. Siblings Raymond and Gloria have had enough and set out one night with one goal in mind: to stop the Black Dog, whatever it takes. In a chase through the streets and parks and beaches of Dublin, the children run after the Black Dog, and soon dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of kids join in their fight. They discover they have one weapon against the Black Dog. The weapon is a word: “brilliant.” Illustrated throughout by a bright new talent and told through the masterful dialogue for which the acclaimed Roddy Doyle is known, Brilliant is a very special book with a storybook feel.

Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of confidences and catching up in this captivating new book from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.Two friends meet for dinner on the north side of Dublin. David has been living for 25 years in England, where he and his wife moved after getting married in order to put some distance between themselves and his family and the ghosts of hers. Joe married, stayed in Dublin, and is now a father with an estranged wife and children. As their evening together begins Joe begins to tell David about an encounter he has had with a woman from their pasts. The woman was a beautiful, elusive acquaintance from their twenties with whom they both were half in love, mostly from afar. Joe has run into her at his children's high school, and his story unfolds from there. Davy listens barely suppressing a rush of emotions—rage, curiosity and repulsion, as the...

It's the summer holidays and Rover is busy searching for poo. He works for The Gigglers, small furry creatures who make sure grown-ups are nice to their kids. If they aren't, they get the Giggler Treatment - a smelly, squishy present on the end of their shoe, which is where Rover comes in.But Rover and his nephew Messi (who is actually very tidy) are distracted from their job by a Big Fat Baby (B.F.B) who's fallen out of her Granny's backpack. It's time for Rover to find the B.F.B, even if it means chasing a postie all over the city, following an aeroplane to Casablanca and leaving the Gigglers with a poo shortage...The fourth title in the madly funny Giggler series and illustrated throughout by Chris Judge, this is Booker Prize-winning Roddy Doyle at his hilarious, brilliant best.

A collection of sublimely funny dialogues inspired by a year's worth of news. Two men meet for a pint in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights, take the piss... They talk about their wives, their kids, their kids' pets, their football teams and -- this being Ireland in 2011-12 -- about the euro, the crash, the presidential election, the Queen's visit. But these men are not parochial or small-minded; one of them knows where to find the missing Colonel Gadaffi (he's working as a cleaner at Dublin Airport); they worry about Greek debt, the IMF and the bondholders (whatever they might be); in their fashion, they mourn the deaths of Whitney Houston, Donna Summer, Davy Jones and Robin Gibb; and they ask each other the really important questions like 'Would you ever let yourself be digitally enhanced?'

This funky, rude, unpretentious first novel traces the short, funny, and furious career of a group of working-class Irish kids who form a band, The Commitments. Their mission: to bring soul to Dublin!

Meet the Rabbitte family, motley bunch of loveable ne’er-do-wells whose everyday purgatory is rich with hangovers, dogshit and dirty dishes. When the older sister announces her pregnancy, the family is forced to rally together and discover the strangeness of intimacy. But the question remains: which friend of the family is the father of Sharon’s child?