Roddy Doyle has 12 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 50 ratings. The most-rated is Smile.
Smile
Summary
"It's Doyle's bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." (npr.org) From the author of the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, an acclaimed, haunting novel about the uncertainty of memory and how we contend with the past. Just moved in to 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 brings over his pint 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, Victor's 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 last minutes, you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.
©2017 Roddy Doyle (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada
The Second Half
Summary
Narrated by Stephen Hogan and introduced by Roy Keane. In an 18-year playing career for Cobh Ramblers, Nottingham Forest, and Manchester United (under Sir Alex Ferguson) and Celtic, Roy Keane dominated every midfield he led to glory. Aggressive and highly competitive, his attitude helped him to excel as captain of Manchester United from 1997 until his departure in 2005. He played at an international level for nearly all of his career, representing the Republic of Ireland over 14 years, mainly as team captain, until an incident with national coach Mick McCarthy resulted in Keane's walk-out from the 2002 World Cup. Since retiring as a player, Keane has managed Sunderland and Ipswich and become a notably contrarian pundit for ITV. He is assistant (to Martin O'Neill) manager of the Ireland team. The TV analyst reflects the manager, the player, and the man himself, the unique Roy Keane - Keano. As part of a tiny elite of football players, Roy Keane has lived and experienced what very few people could ever imagine. His status as one of football's greatest stars is undisputed, but what of the challenges beyond the pitch? How did he succeed in coming to terms with life as a former Manchester United and Ireland leader and champion, reinvent himself as a broadcaster, and cope with the psychological struggles this entailed? This book is a personal odyssey, a blend of anecdote and reflection which re-evaluates the meaning of success. In following his personal struggle to reinvent himself, confronting a few demons along the way, The Second Half blends memoir and motivational writing in a manner which both disquiets and reassures in Roy Keane's original voice, in a stunning collaboration brilliantly captured with Man Booker Prize-winning writer Roddy Doyle.
©2014 Roy Keane and Roddy Doyle (P)2014 Orion Publishing Group
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Summary
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 1993 Paddy Clarke is ten years old. Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown, north Dublin. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke has a brother called Francis, but Paddy calls him Sinbad and hates him because that's the rule. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee. Paddy Clarke loves his Ma and Da, but it seems like they don't love each other, and Paddy's world is falling apart.
©1993 Roddy Doyle (P)2011 Random House Audio Go
The Commitments
Summary
Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from Paris Hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?
©2013 Roddy Doyle (P)1987 Random House Audiobooks
A Star Called Henry
Summary
Born in the slums of Dublin in 1901, his father a one-legged whore-house bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he's out robbing, begging, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At 14, already six-foot-two, Henry's in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he's ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian and soon, a killer. With his father's wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a republican legend, one of Michael Collins' boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike. An historical novel like none before it, A Star Called Henry marks a new chapter in Roddy Doyle's writing. It is a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before. A subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism, at its centre a passionate love story, this is a triumphant work of fiction.
©1999 Roddy Doyle (P)1999 Random House Audiobooks
Love
Summary
Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of confidences - some planned, some spontaneous - in this captivating new book from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Old friends meet up on a summer's evening at a Dublin restaurant. Both are now married with grown-up children, and 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 a moving portrait of what it means to put into words the many forms love can take throughout our lives.
©2020 Roddy Doyle (P)2020 Knopf Canada
The Guts
Summary
Jimmy Rabbitte is back. The man who invented the Commitments back in the eighties is now forty-seven, with a loving wife, four kids...and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be. Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle - his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin he meets two of the Commitments - Outspan, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever. He is reunited with his long-lost brother and learns to play the trumpet.... This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. It climaxes in one of the great passages in Roddy Doyle’s fiction: four middle-aged men at Ireland's hottest rock festival watching Jimmy’s son Marvin’s band Moanin' at Midnight pretending to be Bulgarian and playing a song called 'I'm Going to Hell' that apparently hasn't been heard since 1932.... Why? You’ll have to listen to The Guts to find out.
©2013 Roddy Doyle (P)2013 Random House AudioGo
Charlie Savage
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Charlie Savage, by Roddy Doyle. Meet Charlie Savage: a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who’s realized that he’s been a woman all along.... Compiled here for the first time is a whole year’s worth of Roddy Doyle’s hilariousseries for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man - funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered - trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don’t give out first).
©2019 Roddy Doyle (P)2019 Random House Audiobooks
The Woman Who Walked into Doors
Summary
Paula O'Leary is hugely popular with the boys from her working-class Dublin neighbourhood. But it is the charming Charlo Spencer who finally gets her. Yet after their honeymoon, everything changes. When Charlo first strikes her, she is stunned. But as his violent outbursts develop from slaps and bruises to broken fingers and knocked-out teeth, she gradually loses all self-respect, denying how bleak things are and drinking heavily. This is the heart-rending story of a woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after a violent, abusive marriage.
©1996 Roddy Doyle (P)2007 Isis Publishing
Bullfighting
Summary
Roddy Doyle has earned a devoted following for his wry wit, his uncanny ear, and his ability to fully capture the hearts of his characters. Bullfighting, his second collection of stories, offers a series of bittersweet takes on men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Moving from classrooms to local pubs to bullrings, these tales feature an array of men taking stock and reliving past glories, each concerned with loss in different ways--of their place in their world, of their power, virility, health, and love. "Recuperation" follows a man as he sets off on his daily prescribed walk around his neighborhood, the sights triggering recollections of his family and his younger days. In "Animals," George recalls caring for his children's many pets and his heartfelt efforts to spare them grief when they died or disappeared. The title story captures the mixture of bravado and helplessness of four friends who go off to Spain on holiday. Sharply observed, funny, and moving, these 13 stories present a new vision of contemporary Ireland, of its woes and triumphs, and of middle-aged men trying to break out of the routines of their lives.
©2011 Roddy Doyle (P)2011 AudioGO
The Van
Summary
The final book in Roddy Doyle's highly acclaimed Barrytown Trilogy focuses on Jimmy Rabbitte Sr, who is facing the vicissitudes of unemployment when his friend Bimbo invites him to become his partner in a new venture: a fish and chip van.
© Roddy Doyle; (P) Random House
The Commitments
Summary
Barrytown, Dublin, has something to sing about. The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabitte, brilliantly coached by Joel "The Lips" Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from paris hall to immortality on vinyl. But can The Commitments live up to their name?
© Roddy Doyle; (P) Random House