Love

By: Roddy Doyle

Narrated by: Roddy Doyle

Brought to you by Penguin.

‘A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality’ John Boyne

One summer’s evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant.

Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.

Neither Davy nor Joe know what the night has in store, but as two pints turns to three, then five, and the men set out to revisit the haunts of their youth, the ghosts of Dublin entwine around them. Their first buoyant forays into adulthood, the pubs, the parties, broken hearts and bungled affairs, as well as the memories of what eventually drove them apart.

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

©Roddy Doyle 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critic reviews

Masterly... A first-rate novel about the different bonds between men and the ineffable mysteries of love. (Claire Allfree)

Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue... And there is beauty and compassion in Mr Doyle's sculpted, spare writing. Among all the banter and gags he manages to articulate feelings that are rarely expressed so fittingly... Love is a reminder that its author is one to treasure.

Fast-paced and deceptively easy to read... Goes down as smoothly as gulps of beer.

Love is altogether spellbinding... The whole book is audacious, richly layered and often comic, but ultimately deeply moving... Move over Socrates and watch an Irish master of dialogue at work. (David Monagan)

So perfectly constructed it is hard to believe it is really just about two old school friends getting drunk, and drunker... [Love] seems to bottle what male friendship can be like. (Chris Harvey)

Here is a paean to all things Irish. Fans of [Doyle] will be glad to follow old mates Davy and Joe through a pub crawl that is both elegiac and hilarious.

Sharp, funny... Easy to read, hard to forget. (Teddy Jamieson)

A praise-song to the Irish pub... The reader is dropped into the familiar, perfect rhythm of Roddy Doyle's effortless dialogue...good humour and camaraderie. (Erica Wagner)

He's a comic genius. (Diana Hendry)

No one does boozy male regret better than Doyle, and he's on typically fluent form in this slow-burn tale of two old friends... A narrative engine that Doyle has perfected over decades. (Anthony Cummins)