Smile: Roddy Doyle - Tapa blanda

"Reading Smile, one is swept along – as in all Doyle’s novels – by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head... Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed – the rituals of male friendships, the pride a mother takes in her son getting a job... the way an uncertain man feels when a beautiful woman shows interest... There is not a superfluous word." (Mick Brown Daily Telegraph)

"The final pages of the novel are shocking, and they turn everything preceding it on its head. It’s testament to the power of Doyle’s writing that the ending is deeply moving, and so very sad." (Alice O'Keeffe Bookseller)

"Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humour and the superb evocation of childhood – but this is a novel unlike any he has written before." (Olaf Tyaransen Hotpress.com)

"His darkest and perhaps finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors 20 years ago, Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career...and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving and even, at times, distressing, while saving its greatest surprise until the end... He takes great risks with his story as the novel progresses. To say more would be to spoil the truly unexpected climax that Smile reaches, but suffice to say that to call this the least Roddyesque of Doyle’s work would be an understatement. There is a brave and complex ending to the novel... Like all good literature, it will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself." (John Boyne Guardian)

"Smile turns out to be a novel of literary deception and self-deception, of suppression, guilt, fantasy and the deep damage that leaves a mind profoundly disordered... I finished this novel with a thrumming in my head of pure horror and, a month later, looking at those final pages again, the hammering returned as loud as ever... I suspect Smile will become a bestseller, particularly among men who don’t read much fiction. It’s one of the saddest novels I’ve ever read about the disintegration of male identity under assault from power and cruelty and finally, one has to accept, pure evil." (Linda Grant Daily Telegraph)

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.