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“... This is the third and last of Roddy Doyle’s novels about the Rabbitte family of Barrymount, an unprepossessing council estate suburb of North Dublin, much like Kilbarrack, where Doyle was born himself. Barrymount, although by no means a foul rag-and-bone shop, is a place for dreams to start ...”

“... what you are is a way of trying to make contact with a mother, not a condition in itself. Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger rank among Dublin’s so-called Northside realists, creating a world in which compulsively blaspheming council-estate dwellers keep cocaine in the bath and horses in the kitchen. This novel, by contrast, could be described as ...”

“... Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and Family, at least) offer essentially the ...”

“... led me by the head into the kitchen and closed the door. Paddy Clarke, the ten-year-old hero of Roddy Doyle’s remarkable new novel, rocks at night to the sound of his parents’ scratching at the usual matrimonial sores. The intermittent din of their growing unhappiness is the primary soundtrack to his life at home. We watch him try to make sense of ...”

“... perhaps because the novel market is undergoing one of its periodic and mysterious bad periods. The Roddy Doyle bestseller, winner last year, benefited from being Irish and about children. Novels now seem to be bought because they are popular, rather than becoming popular because they are talked about. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that ...”

“... offers to redeem that everyday catastrophe. Tyler’s work has been championed by Nick Hornby and Roddy Doyle, among others, as part of a case for the deep seriousness of domestic-realist novels, which are, it’s argued, sneerily sidelined as ‘middlebrow’ by a cultural establishment that values experimentation and philosophising above storytelling ...”

“... out was to become the Nick Hornby of drug consciousness, where Irving Welsh had already become the Roddy Doyle. But the obvious was never Penman’s thing. A piece originally published in Arena that might have done the trick, humanising and domesticating the processes of exchange and controlled derangement, bringing chemical exoticism down to the takeaway ...”

“... the praise. It isn’t unknown for a son to pay tribute while his father is still alive – Roddy Doyle did it (to both parents) in Rory and Ita (2002) – but it’s usually death that provides the spur. All the things that went unspoken in his lifetime (‘Died before we’d done much talking’ goes the Ian Dury song ‘My Old Man’) can ...”

“... I mean, he’s actually not so very good at dialogue (not when you think of Peter McDougall or Roddy Doyle). It’s the way people talk to themselves that he gets so brilliantly, so matchlessly. While the peripheral characters in his stories often exchange words in a pretty featureless manner, his central characters have always had a wonderful way ...”