Paula Spencer
Roddy Doyle
Ten years on from The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Booker Prize-winning author, Roddy Doyle, returns to one of his greatest characters, Paula Spencer.
Paula Spencer is turning forty-eight, and 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 seem to come from Eastern Europe. You can get a cappuccino in the café and the checkout girls are all Nigerian. Ireland is certainly changing, but then so too is Paula – dry, and determined to put her family back together again.
‘A phenomenally rewarding read… Could not be bettered in its depiction of the minutiae of the life of a recovering alcoholic: relentless, trivial, terrified’ Observer
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About Roddy Doyle
Reviews for Paula Spencer
Carmen Callil
Financial Times
Roddy Doyle has done the impossible - he has made Paula Spencer even more unforgettable the second time round
The Times
[A] magnificent achievement
Guardian
Doyle has created a little masterwork, a gem of persuasive realism
Tom Adair
Scotland on Sunday
An intoxicating sequel...a phenomenally rewarding read
Euan Ferguson
Observer
Paula is a triumphantly original character, and her gently anarchic sense of humour, her ruthless honesty and the bursting sense of fun that permeates the book scotch any hint of sentimentalism. Doyle constructs his set-pieces and orders the narrative with a craft so unobtrustively elegant and clever that it demands a second reading. This is a splendid piece of work
Independent on Sunday
Doyle's writing is as sharp as ever. Sentences snap out from the page, some so short they only contain one word... Paula Spencer has come into her own and Roddy Doyle has gained a comfortable and wholly convincing access into the female mind
Irish Times
This is a magnificent novel...not once does Doyle offer any sentimental cop-out or wallow in bleakness... It's a disciplined piece of writing, full of humour and immense empathy - and what more can you ask than that?
Scotsman
There is an intense pleasure in the reading of this book
Claudia Fitzherbert
Telegraph
A complex and intricate portrait of an unlikely, yet likable, heroine
Calum Macdonald
The Herald