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Smile

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Smile

By: Roddy Doyle
Narrated by: Roddy Doyle
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 a 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.

© Roddy Doyle 2017 (P) Penguin Audio 2017

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic Reviews

Roddy Doyle excelled himself… A typically bittersweet novella about a middle-aged man’s memories of his schooldays which pulls the rug shockingly from under the reader’s feet. (Justine Jordan)
A book that made me feel I really was in the presence of a master. (Sebastian Barry)
Reading Smile, one is swept along – as in all Doyle’s novels – by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head… Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed (Mick Brown)
Terribly moving and even, at times, distressing, while saving its greatest surprise until the end… There is a brave and complex ending to the novel… It will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself. (John Boyne)
Smile turns out to be a novel of literary deception and self-deception, of suppression, guilt, fantasy and the deep damage that leaves a mind profoundly disordered… I suspect Smile will become a bestseller (Linda Grant)
Dramatically pulls the rug from under the reader with a final image not just of one damaged man, but of an impotent country poisoned to the core by a history that it cannot shake off. It left me with goosebumps and, a week on, a sour, sad taste still in my mouth. (Claire Allfree)
The cocktail of dark subject matter and colloquial, humorous dialogue is quintessential Doyle, and this engrossing tale, shot through with pathos, sees him back to his best. (Max Davidson)
His command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding… An absorbing and expertly told story. (Sam Leith)
Doyle is one of the best writers of dialogue we have, using it with humour and drama. (Luke Brown)
His novels fizz with demotic zing, comic phrasing and the back-and-forth of Irish chat. (Robbie Millen)
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