Publishers Weekly
07/22/2024
Booker Prize winner Doyle’s third Paula Spencer novel (after 1996’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors and 2006’s Paula Spencer) is an emotionally raw mother-daughter drama. Paula, a widow in her mid-60s, who’s in recovery for alcoholism, returns home from her Covid-19 vaccine appointment in May 2021 to find her 40-something daughter Nicola waiting for her. Nicola, who cared for Paula during earlier family crises and has continued to supplement her mom’s finances, seems content to be mothered for a change. For reasons that don’t come out until later, she’s left her husband and children behind. Over the next 18 months, as Paula deals with a nasty bout of the virus and worries about money, Doyle eventually works up to revealing why Nicola came to stay with her. If that disclosure is somewhat anticlimactic, it’s ultimately less important than Paula’s reaction to Nicola’s news, which comes to shape her understanding not only of their fraught relationship but also of how her own past traumas impacted Nicola. Despite these revelatory conversations, Nicola remains something of a cipher; Paula, on the other hand, is a richly complex character who continues to redefine herself while also contending with her regrets and past failures. Doyle’s compassionate chronicle of recovery and reconciliation is worth seeking out. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
A most-anticipated book of Fall 2024 from LitHub | PEOPLE | Los Angeles Review
“The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are so flawed. . .[a]nd they are such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising.” —The Washington Post
“A showdown between mother and daughter that is about as emotionally painful as it gets. . . unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.” —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times
“[The Women Behind the Door is a] miracle of a novel. . .with Paula, Doyle has created a fictional character as memorable as Molly Bloom or the Wife of Bath.” —Associated Press
“Possibly Doyle’s most mature, and certainly his most structurally sophisticated [novel].” —The Times
“An interestingly spiky portrait of late-life maternal ambivalence. . . .a wild and hilarious narrative voice. . . .The book deals with hard times and dark matters, but there’s always light in the writing.” —The Guardian
“Doyle has been described as ‘the undisputed laureate of ordinary lives’ and nowhere is that illustrated more in his work than with Paula Spencer.” —The Irish Times
“A novel of hauntings. . .There is lightness here, too—lightness and humor. . .Doyle is superb at channeling Paula’s interior voice: witty, cranky, desperately honest. The dialogue is spot-on.” —Laurie Hertzel, The Star Tribune
“Readers familiar with Doyle’s past novels won’t be surprised by the cheerfully profane dialogue and zippy vernacular on every page of this emotionally resonant work.” —Shelf Awareness
“A riveting, indelible portrait.” —PEOPLE
“In Doyle’s crisp, wry language, the story of that pain is just the story of life, along with all its small moments of levity and unexpected connection.” —The Washington Post
“An emotionally raw mother-daughter drama. . . Doyle’s compassionate chronicle of recovery and reconciliation is worth seeking out.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Doyle] excels in the singing speech of ordinary people that reveal the seething emotions underneath. . . .A gripping, blisteringly honest examination of issues too long swept under the rug.” —Kirkus
“Doyle’s writing about women is always sensitive and insightful but it is his inquiry into the human mind and heart which is most compelling of all.” —The Gloss
“[Doyle] is at his best documenting the daily lives of regular people, and that’s exactly what he’s done here.” —The Irish News
“[Doyle] brings his storytelling genius to a tale about a family crisis.” —iNews
“I’ve been reading Roddy Doyle’s since The Commitments, and I can’t imagine ever stopping. He is a brilliant, one-of-a-kind writer—passionate, funny and humane.” —David Nicholls, author of One Day
“With The Woman Who Walked Into Doors Roddy Doyle understood what we call ‘coercive control’ before society gave it a name. You might think that achievement enough, but he also gave us the wounded, yearning, beautiful heart of Paula Spencer. The character is a hymn to female generosity; the ordinary, discardable kind that keeps the world turning. Reading her voice for the first time sent a pang of recognition through me, followed by love.” —Anne Enright, author of Booker Prize-winner The Gathering
Kirkus Reviews
2024-08-29
Paula Spencer returns, with the demons of her past lurking everywhere around her.
Charlo, the abusive husband who drove her to alcoholism inThe Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), has been dead for years, and the shaky sobriety chronicled inPaula Spencer (2007) is long-standing, but the damage inflicted by the beatings and the binges is still with Paula at age 66. The fallout is most evident in Paula’s eldest, Nicola, who spent her childhood dealing with a drunken mother and chaotic household. Having worked her way into middle-class respectability, with a gentle husband and three girls, she still acts as though she must take care of Paula, and she still furiously resents it. Simmering tensions between the two, well laid out in the novel’s leisurely opening chapters, are exacerbated by the Covid-19 lockdown and come to a head when Nicola storms into Paula’s house declaring, “I’ll kill them.” A glimpse of her brother-in-law ogling her 15-year-old daughter has brought back memories of the look at Nicola that prompted Paula to violently drive Charlo from their home—but not, Nicola bitterly tells her now, before several incidents of inappropriate comments and touching. Years of rage come pouring out of Nicola, and Doyle unsparingly reveals Paula’s angry thoughts in response: Did her daughter not know how many times she stood between Charlo and her kids, how many broken bones sent her to drink as a pain reliever? Doyle is no fancy stylist; he excels in the singing speech of ordinary people that reveal the seething emotions underneath. There’s no feel-good resolution here, simply the will to go on and the understanding that the bonds of familial love may buckle but can never be broken.
A gripping, blisteringly honest examination of issues too long swept under the rug.
