Smile: A Novel

Author: Doyle, Roddy

Number Of Pages: 224

Details:

From the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bold, haunting novel about the uncertainty of memory and how we contend with the past. "It's his bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." -- npr.org “The closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller."– The New York Times Book Review Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. 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—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity. Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.

Reviews:

"Smile is a novel that's as original as it is brutal, and as painful as it is necessary. Doyle asks us not just to consider the ravages of post-traumatic stress, but to  feel them, or as closely as we can, anyway. It's his bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." --Michael Schaub, npr.org

“Has anyone written as beautifully as Doyle on how love and violence lean right up against each other in childhood? . . . From the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha to Smile, Doyle’s books bruise and cheer at the same time.” –The Boston Globe

“Doyle was determined to write a novel that shocked – and succeeded . . . This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“The closest thing [Doyle’s] written to a psychological thriller . . . showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue.  His ear and eye are peerless.”  – The New York Times Book Review

“Doyle's finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,  Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career . . . and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving . . . Like all good literature, [ Smile] 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.”  –The Guardian

“The fear of honest disclosure is central to Mr. Doyle’s newest novel,  Smile , about the lies men tell to make themselves appear normal . . . Mr. Doyle’s signature clipped dialogue is still a feature of Smile, but this short, effective novel is about the truths that emerge when, despite himself, Victor lets himself talk.” – The Wall Street Journal

"Another of Doyle's rich and sympathetic character studies." --The New York Review of Books

“[Doyle] employs his sly humor and unparalleled ear for banter between convincingly imperfect characters to craft an unsettling work of psychological suspense . . . [an] artful meditation on pain, memory, and how we build the stories of our lives. It is his most powerful and sobering novel since  The Woman Who Walked into Doors.”  – The Seattle Times

“Beautifully written, and beautifully observed . . . Reading Smile, one is swept along – as in all Doyle’s novels – by the vibrancy of language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twi...

EAN: 9780735224445

Release Date: 17-10-2017

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Hardcover Used - Like New Ships fast! 2017

Item Condition: UsedLikeNew

Binding: Hardcover