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Where to start with Roddy Doyle: a guide to his best books
As last year’s Chair of Booker Prize judges curates a new Booker-themed short-story collection, we offer a whistlestop tour of his finest writing
Roddy Doyle’s books are full of comedy, but it is his no-nonsense approach to work that has helped him write them. The Irish author has no time for the romantic notion of an artist who waits for inspiration. Instead, he gets down to work, writing from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, whether it’s fiction, screenplays, children’s books, newspaper columns or any of the other projects that occupy an author of remarkable range and versatility.
Doyle knows there is no time to waste and this comes through in his books, which include his Booker Prize-shortlisted The Van and his Booker winner Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Every sentence of these works is alive with wit and tenderness, and crackles with energy – and all in the service of the reader’s pleasure.
Barrytown, the fictional suburb of Dublin where five of his novels take place, is not always an easy place to live, but the warmth with which Doyle writes about it, and the exuberant expletive-laden dialogue, means readers love going there. Doyle’s eye for the humour and poignancy of everyday life continues to make his fiction relatable and moving. He captures the dreams that help people get through their days, and the joy of self-expression.
Doyle, who was also the Chair of judges for the Booker Prize 2025, is the ideal author to curate and introduce All Around The World, a new collection of seven short stories written by Booker Prize- and International Booker Prize-nominated writers, including Anne Enright, David Szalay and Yoko Ogawa. The book will be launched this month [June] by the Booker Prize Foundation, in partnership with The Reading Agency, and 10,000 copies will be gifted to adults in the UK who face barriers to reading. It supports the Quick Reads mission to get people reading for pleasure. Find out more here.
In the meantime, here’s a guide to some of Doyle’s best books, with the focus on the novels, plus a few others across the many genres he works in.
All Around the World Quick Reads
A soulful start – The Commitments (1987)
The Commitments is about a Dublin soul band, in Doyle’s fictional suburb of Barrytown. The cast of characters is unforgettable, starting with the protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte, the band’s manager, who lies in the bath and imagines he’s being interviewed by famous journalists. Rabbitte also gives the band members their ‘soul names’, such as the veteran trumpet player Joey ‘The Lips’ Fagan and Derek ‘The Meatman’ Scully. Their zeal for music (an enduring interest for Doyle and his characters) drives this short novel and you hear every note the band plays.
Doyle wrote his first novel in six months in his spare time from his job as a teacher, on a typewriter he borrowed from his mother, and used a bank loan to self-publish it. It is an ecstatic blast of a book about working-class life from an Ireland that was, in Doyle’s words, ‘an economic basket case’. In 1991, the director Alan Parker adapted The Commitments for what would become a cherished, BAFTA-winning film.
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
Back to Barrytown – The Snapper (1990)
Doyle’s second novel revolves around Jimmy Rabbitte’s 20-year-old sister, Sharon, and her unwanted pregnancy. Who is the father of the eponymous ‘snapper’? Sharon refuses to say, but it turns out to be her friend’s dad, George, a middle-aged man who’s in denial about his behaviour and dismissive of Sharon’s interests. Does what George regards as a drunken sexual encounter with Sharon, who only partially remembers it, amount to assault? It’s up to the reader to decide but, what may have sounded like an indiscretion when the novel was published 35 years ago, may look more sinister today.
The book’s emotional heart is Sharon’s relationship with her own father, Jimmy Sr, who is initially disappointed in his daughter, and conscious of their community’s disapproval, but eventually becomes supportive as his bond with his daughter deepens. The subject matter may be weightier than The Commitments but Doyle’s second novel still abounds with jokes and a cacophony of comic voices – something captured in Stephen Frears’ film adaptation.
The Snapper by Roddy Doyle
A Booker shortlisted novel about friendship and fast food – The Van (1991)
Jimmy Sr is in the driving seat when Doyle rolls into Barrytown for the third time in this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel. When Jimmy loses his job, he helps to look after his granddaughter Gina (Sharon’s daughter from the previous novel) and starts reading classic novels, but he misses work and evenings at the pub with his pals. Then Jimmy’s friend Bimbo is also laid off and, after he uses his redundancy pay to buy a ‘chipper’ (a fish and chip van), the pair go into business. The resourcefulness of Doyle’s characters is evident again but, of course, the men’s friendship is tested and, although they make a go of it at first, toiling over the deep fat fryer brings challenges.
The Van by Roddy Doyle
A boy’s story and Booker winner – Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
Child narrators present difficulties for any novelist. Namely, how do you make it read like you’re writing from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy and not the perspective of a middle-aged author trying to remember what being young was like? Doyle, however, makes it look easy in his Booker Prize winner about the eponymous Patrick Clarke’s 1960s childhood. Paddy conveys everything about his parents, his brother Sinbad, school and his neighbours with the curiosity and idiosyncrasy of a preadolescent child whose world is small yet boundless.
The novel is a snapshot, a year in Paddy’s life, on the edges of innocence and experience, as he comes to understand the truth about his parents’ disintegrating marriage, his role in his family and the city he lives in. Comparisons to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are inevitable, from the very first sentence, though Doyle appears to have a complicated relationship with his fellow Dubliner. ‘It’s a pain in the arse, when you’re a Dublin writer,’ he told the Guardian recently, ‘you’re inevitably asked about Joyce, and it’s tedious. He doesn’t have copyright on the streets of Dublin.’
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
The one that revealed hard truths – The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996)
Doyle moved away from Barrytown in his fifth novel and entered darker terrain with a story which shattered the silence around domestic violence in Ireland. Mother of four Paula Spencer tells the story of her life, looking back on her happy childhood and youth, before she married small-time criminal and alcoholic Charlo, a man who became increasingly violent towards her.
While several of Doyle’s books have been adapted for the screen, Paula’s story made the journey in reverse. It began life as the subject of the TV series Family, which Doyle wrote and which caused controversy in Ireland. The novel gives him more scope to explore his protagonist’s inner life and the complex pain of her marriage to Charlo, as she remarks: ‘He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it.’
The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
His parents in their owns words – Rory and Ita (2002)
Templeogue Tennis Club in Dublin, where Rory Doyle and Ita Bolger met at a New Year’s Eve dance in 1947, may be a far cry from the literary world that would celebrate their son, but their life together provides rich material for this non-fiction meditation on marriage and, more subtly, a changing Ireland. In alternating chapters, the titular couple describe the same events from separate perspectives, with their author son shaping the narrative into a unified whole. Doyle’s attempt to explore who his parents are – aside from being his parents – manages to be modest, moving and experimental.
Rory & Ita by Roddy Doyle
Stories about midlife, blood and beasts – Bullfighting (2011)
Doyle is a prolific writer of short stories and Bullfighting is a thematically coherent collection about male Dubliners navigating middle-age. Written when Doyle was in the thick of his own midlife experiences, it records his characters’ responses to this period, when every creak of their bones tells them they’re no longer young and sparks quiet terror at what the future might hold. This manifests itself in everyday bewilderment, unsettling encounters with animals, and drinking blood. Through it all, male camaraderie endures, as it has through Doyle’s entire oeuvre.
Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle
A ghostly children’s story about big themes – A Greyhound of a Girl (2011)
If women were often in the background for the men in Doyle’s stories mentioned above, it is the other way around in the sixth of Doyle’s eight books for children. Like Paddy Clarke, 11-year-old Mary is on the border between childhood and adolescence. She also moves between the living and the dead, as the ghost of her great-grandmother wants her to deliver a message to her sick grandmother. It’s a story about family and loss. It was another Doyle work that a director thought was ripe for adaptation, this time in the form of a beautiful 2023 animation by Enzo D’Alo, with Sharon Horgan and Brendan Gleason voicing Mary’s parents.
A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle
One that mixes genres, asks little and provides plenty – Charlie Savage (2019)
For a few years, Doyle wrote a column for the Irish Independent newspaper under the pseudonym Charlie Savage – a blend of observation, fiction and opinion which once again displayed his range. It formed the basis of this 2019 novel about ageing, family, friendship and some of his other favourite subjects. As ever with Doyle, it is the light touch, the vernacular dialogue (terms such as ‘gobshite’ and ‘bollix’ abound) and sophisticated structure – in this case overlapping vignettes of everyday life – that ensures even a minor work provides major enjoyment for his readers.
Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle
