Love

A Novel

By: Roddy Doyle

Narrated by: Morgan C. Jones

Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of drinking and storytelling in this winning new novel from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica.

Davy knows her too, or should—she was the girl of their dreams four decades earlier, the girl with the cello in George's pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin—pint after pint, pub after pub—so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland: his first encounter with Faye, the lively woman who would become his wife; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers a delightfully comic yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives.

©2020 Roddy Doyle (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Love] isn’t so much about what happens, or happened once upon a time, as it is about the mystically inaccurate nature of language . . . Doyle puts feeling first in this novel by putting it last, in the final pages . . . in the end, you see that the sacred world of the two friends was lurking in all that preceded this final scene, and concealing itself so successfully that they themselves did not realize how much they cared for each other.”—The New York Times Book Review

“This story, with its beer-inspired and home-brewed philosophy, its funny and painful moments, is about love . . . and the remembrance of love between friends, lovers, and family . . . Doyle’s narrative style is fast-paced and deceptively easy to read . . . [dialogue] goes down as smoothly as gulps of beer. . . [a] brilliant two-character story.”—The Boston Globe

"Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue, which combines salty humor and the loving use of local vernacular . . . there is beauty and compassion in [his] sculpted, spare writing . . . Love is a reminder that its author is one to treasure.”—The Economist