Smile

Cheaper in another edition — €1.00 at Ammareal FR Smile - Roddy Doyle, Christophe Mercier · French edition · See that edition →

"A breakout from the Booker-prize-winning novelist Roddy Doyle. A psychological suspense novel unlike any he's written before, about how we contend with the past, trauma, guilt and regret, and the uncertainty of memory. Who is unreliable? 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 high 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 adolescence--but this is a novel…

The cheapest new copy of Smile is £8.99 at LoveReading. Prices checked 14 Nov 2026

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