Roddy Doyle, página 2 de 4

When we first met Paula Spencer - in THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together. PAULA SPENCER begins on the eve of Paula's forty-ninth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the caf‚, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria. Paula's got four grandchildren now; two of them are called Marcus and Sapphire. Reviewing THE WOMAN WHO WALKED INTO DOORS, Mary Gordon wrote: 'It is the triumph of this novel that Mr Doyle - entirely without condescension - shows the inner life of this battered house-cleaner to be the same stuff as that of the heroes of the great novels of Europe.' Her words hold true for this new novel. Paula Spencer is brave, tenacious and very funny. The novel that bears her name is another triumph for Roddy Doyle.

El autor de Café irlandés inicia con esta novela, una triología sobre la historia de su país: Irlanda. Su protagonista es un joven llamado Henry Smart, un desheredado que acabará integrándose en las filas del IRA. Son los inicios el siglo XX y al joven Henry le aguardan nuevas y sorprendentes peripecias.

Un policía bisoño se presenta de súbito en casa de Paula: su marido, Charlo, ha muerto a manos de las fuerzas del orden. Charlo era guapo, fascinante, el preferido de todas las amigas de Paula. Y un chulo. Es la vida de Paula, en nítidas escenas que cortan el aliento por su precisión y su realismo. Es el martirio de Paula, una mujer sencilla y soñadora, bajo el poder de un marido brutal. Palizas, lesiones graves, torturas. Visitas a Urgencias. La excusa de costumbre: «Me he dado un golpe con la puerta». Un aborto. Los médicos tratan a Paula con desdén. Una mañana, Paula coincide con Nicola, su hija, en la cocina. Charlo la mira de un modo extraño. De repente, Paula comprende. Entre ambas mujeres, a golpe de sartén, consiguen echar a Charlo a la calle. Han hecho, por fin, algo bueno. Una novela absolutamente extraordinaria, que viene a confirmar la estatura literaria de uno de los grandes novelistas irlandeses de nuestro tiempo.

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?

Memorable recreación en clave de novela de los tormentosos y felices años veinte en Estados Unidos, esta obra cuenta con otros dos grandes personajes, además de Henry Smart -alter ego de Louis Armstrong-: la mafia y el jazz. El rentable negocio que promovio la Ley Seca y la musica negra, dan un sabor y un color unicos, que nos introduce directamente en la imagineria del cine negro y en los duros años de la segregacion racial.Una novela en torno a la figura del trompetista y cantante Louis Armstrong.

En Una estrella llamada Henry Roddy Doyle deja a un lado las peripecias de las familias de los suburbios de la Irlanda contemporánea para meterse de lleno en una novela picaresca sobre el último siglo de la historia de su país. A través de su protagonista, Henry Smart, -precoz, inteligente, seductor... uno de esos personajes arrolladores que combinan los atributos legendarios de héroes y villanos- Doyle recrea la evolución de la Irlanda moderna con humor, inspiración, aplomo y notables dosis de escepticismo sobre los orígenes míticos del nacionalismo republicano. Una estrella llamada Henry es una novela de madurez, narrada con la voz inimitable de Doyle: ingeniosa y visceral, profundamente irlandesa.

En 1924 Henry Smart deja atrás una Irlanda católica y caótica para adentrarse en el loco y fascinante mundo que representaba Estados Unidos en los años veinte. Un universo lleno de licor ilegal, sexo y jazz. Henry pasa de traficar con brebajes en Manhattan a sobrevivir en una Chicago azotada por las mafias, para finalmente convertirse en el hombre de confianza de Louis Armstrong. Una fascinante novela que parece salida de la pantalla del mejor cine negro.

At the end of Oh, Play That Thing, the second volume of Roddy Doyle's trilogy about Henry Smart, Henry, his leg severed in an accident with a railway boxcar, crawls into the Utah desert to die - only to be discovered by John Ford, who's there shooting his latest Western. Ford recognizes a fellow Irish rebel and determines to turn Henry's story into a film. He appoints him 'IRA consultant' on his new film, The Quiet Man. The Dead Republic opens in 1951. Henry is returning to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. With him are the stars of Ford's film, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and the famous director himself, 'Pappy', who in series of intense, highly charged meetings has tried to suck the soul out of Henry and turn it into Hollywood gold-dust. Ten years later Henry is in Dublin, working in Barrytown as a school janitor, feared a little by the teachers but loved by the boys, who call him 'Hoppy Henry' on account of his wooden leg. When Henry is caught in a bomb blast, that wooden leg gets left behind in the debris. He wakes in hospital to find himself a hero: the old IRA veteran who's lost his leg to a UVF bomb. It doesn't take long before the Provos come calling. They need men like Henry. They wheel him out at funerals and rallies, a heroic veteran of 1916. Henry is to find he will have other uses too, when the peace process begins in deadly secrecy. In three brilliant novels, A Star Called Henry, Oh, Play That Thing and The Dead Republic, Roddy Doyle has told the whole history of Ireland in the twentieth century. And in the person of his hero, he has created one of the great characters of modern fiction.

Just moved in to a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's pub for a pint, a slow one.One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from school. Says 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 too - of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor's own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio.But it's the memories of school, and of one particular Brother, that he 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 humour, the superb evocation of childhood - but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to re-evaluate everything you think you remember so clearly.

Desde su rocambolesco nacimiento y su infancia en las calles de Dublín a su participación, como soldado y amante, en la revolución irlandesa, Henry Smart describe su despertar a una vida de aventuras. Mezcla de relato epico, historia de amor y retrato de la Irlanda moderna, Una estrella llamada Henry constituye una gran novela picaresca rebosante de momentos divertidos y conmovedores.Roddy Doyle (Dublin, 1958), de voz inimitable y genuinamente irlandesa, es autor de una solida obra literaria de la que destacan La furgoneta, The commitments o su novel Paddy Clarke, ja ,ja ,ja, que merecio el Premio Brooker 1993. Varias de sus novelas han sido llevadas al cine.

El señor Mack está a punto de meterse de pies a cabeza en un follón que no se merece. Está a punto de experimentar en carne propia.. . la venganza de las Risitas. ¿Por que quieren vengarse de el? ¿Quienes son candidatos a tal venganza? Las personas mayores que dicen que algo sabe a pollo cuando no es cierto, las que los culpan sabiendo que son inocentes, las que se comen el ultimo trozo de pizza sin preguntar si a alguien le apetece mas... ¿En que consiste la venganza? ¿Podra el señor Mack librarse de un castigo injusto? Leed este libro y lo averiguareis.