Audiobooks by Roddy Doyle

A Ghostly Little Book: Five Frightening Tales from Five Essential Writers

"A Ghostly Little Book brings you five brand new spooky stories from five of the best writers on the planet From Edgar Allen Poe to Charles Dickens, from Shirley Jackson to Toni Morrison, the greatest writers have, in some way or other, always been drawn to that ancient, mysterious thing: the haunting. A Ghostly Little Book is a slim, beautiful testament to the enduring appeal of the spook, a landmark collection of especially composed modern ghost stories from five of the most acclaimed and exciting authors at work today. Elif Shafak, Roddy Doyle, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe and Helen Oyeyemi are some of the most original and arresting writers on the planet, and their tales are map of all of the many twists and turns the ghost story might take; at turns strange, unsettling, heartwarming, hilarious and, of course, blood-chilling. © Elif Shafak, Roddy Doyle, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe & Helen Oyeyemi 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Eliza Clark, Helen Oyeyemi, Olga Ravn, Roddy Doyle, Tom Crewe (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Jeeves Again: Twelve New Stories

"Brought to you by Penguin. FEATURING HUGE NAMES FROM LITERATURE, COMEDY AND BEYOND - INCLUDING RODDY DOYLE, FRANK SKINNER AND ALAN TITCHMARSH - THIS ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES REIMAGINES JEEVES AND WOOSTER THROUGH FRESH EYES. The irrepressible duo first appeared on the page in 1915, coming to feature in more than 35 short stories and eleven novels over the course of Wodehouse’s lifetime. Each story in this new collection offers a delightful and original reimagining of the incomparable Bertie Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman – seeing them journey to the horse races in Paris, solve puzzles at a wartime Bletchley Park, and even transported forward in time to the year 2025. - Frank Skinner - Roddy Doyle - Alan Titchmarsh - Dominic Sandbrook - Deborah Frances-White - Andrew Hunter Murray - Scarlett Curtis - Jasper Fforde - John Finnemore - Ian Moore - William Rayfet Hunter - Fergus Craig JEEVES AGAIN is a joyful celebration of Wodehouse as a much-beloved British literary icon – as well as a timely and entertaining reminder of the lasting impact of his characters on a whole new generation of readers and writers. HEAR FROM THE WRITERS . . . 'A Wodehouse book is a journey into joy.' RODDY DOYLE, Booker Prize-winning author of PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA 'Anybody who has even a vague interest in good writing should read Wodehouse.' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, author and co-host of THE REST IS HISTORY 'I simply adore Wodehouse.' ALAN TITCHMARSH MBE, broadcaster and writer 'To stumble into the world of Wodehouse is like sinking into a warm bath.' SCARLETT CURTIS, Sunday Times bestselling author of FEMINISTS DON'T WEAR PINK (AND OTHER LIES) 'What Wodehouse is still today, just as much as ever, is funny.' JOHN FINNEMORE, creator of CABIN PRESSURE © P.G. Wodehouse, Frank Skinner, Roddy Doyle, Alan Titchmarsh, Dominic Sandbrook, Deborah Frances-White, Andrew Hunter Murray, Scarlett Curtis, Jasper Fforde, John Finnemore, Ian Moore, William Rayfet Hunter, Fergus Craig 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025"

Alan Titchmarsh, Andrew Hunter Murray, Deborah Frances-White, Dominic Sandbrook, Fergus Craig, Frank Skinner, Ian Moore, Jasper Fforde, John Finnemore, P.G. Wodehouse, Roddy Doyle, Scarlett Curtis, William Rayfet Hunter (Author), Ayesha Antoine, Fergus Craig, Frank Skinner, Homer Todiwala, Ian Moore, Jasper Fforde, John Finnemore, Kristin Atherton, Max Olesker, Stephen Hogan, William Rayfet Hunter (Narrator)

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The Women Behind the Door: The moving mother-daughter novel from the Booker Prize winner

"Brought to you by Penguin. Booker-Prize winner Roddy Doyle’s spectacular return to his iconic character, Paula Spencer. At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children, now with families and petty dramas the likes of which Paula could only have hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside. That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, “a success” – Nicola is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. Over the next few days, as Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter find themselves untangling anecdotes, jokes, memory and revelation to confront the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other. 'The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives' SUNDAY TIMES 'The best novelist of his generation' NICK HORNBY, author of High Fidelity ©2024 Roddy Doyle (P)2024 Penguin Audio"

Roddy Doyle (Author), Ger Ryan (Narrator)

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Life Without Children: Stories

"Brought to you by Penguin. A brilliantly warm, witty and moving portrait of our pandemic lives, told in ten heart-rending short stories Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone. In these ten, beautifully moving short stories mostly written over the last year, Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle paints a collective portrait of our strange times. A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness, and the shifting of history underneath our feet. © Roddy Doyle 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021"

Roddy Doyle (Author), Roddy Doyle (Narrator)

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Love

"Brought to you by Penguin. ‘A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality’ John Boyne One summer’s evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, 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 up a delightfully comic, yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives. ©Roddy Doyle 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020"

Roddy Doyle (Author), Roddy Doyle (Narrator)

Audiobook

Charlie Savage

"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)."

Roddy Doyle (Author), Roddy Doyle (Narrator)

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Smile

"Brought to you by Penguin. Just moved into 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 a 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. © Roddy Doyle 2017 (P) Penguin Audio 2017"

Roddy Doyle (Author), Roddy Doyle (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Guts

"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 read The Guts to find out."

Roddy Doyle (Author), Laurence Kinlan (Narrator)

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The Commitments

"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 (Author), Laurence Kinlan (Narrator)

Audiobook

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha: The Booker Prize-winning, bestselling novel

"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."

Roddy Doyle (Author), Aidan Gillen (Narrator)

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Bullfighting

"The men in Bullfighting are each concerned with loss in different ways - of their place in their world, of power, virility, love - of the boom days and the Celtic Tiger. 'The stories, his memories, were wearing out' the narrator of the title story thinks, 'and there was nothing new replacing them.' The stories move from classrooms to graveyards, local pubs to bullrings; featuring an array of men at their working day and at rest, taking stock and reliving past glories. In the first, 'Recuperation', a man sets off for a prescribed walk around his neighbourhood, the sights triggering memories and recollections of his wife, his children, his younger days. In 'Animals', George remembers caring for his children's many pets, his efforts to spare them grief when they die or disappear, looking, in the eyes of his wife, like a hero, like 'your man from ER'. But now his kids are reared and he's unemployed, and he's slowly getting used to that. 'Suffer, your man Krugman said, when he was asked how Ireland should deal with the next ten years. Well, this is George, suffering.' Brilliantly observed, funny and moving, the stories in Bullfighting present a new vision of contemporary Ireland, of its woes and triumphs, and of the Irish middle-aged male confronting new realities. It is a masterful new collection from one of the country's greatest writers."

Roddy Doyle (Author), Lorcan Cranitch (Narrator)

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The Deportees

"For the past few years Roddy Doyle has been writing stories for Metro Eireann, a newspaper started by, and aimed at, immigrants to Ireland. Each of the stories took a new slant on the immigrant experience, something of increasing relevance and importance in today's Ireland. The stories range from 'Guess Who's Coming to the Dinner', where a father who prides himself on his open-mindedness when his daughters talk about sex, is forced to confront his feelings when one of them brings home a black fella, to a terrifying ghost story, 'The Pram', in which a Polish nanny grows impatient with her charge's older sisters and decides - in a phrase she has learnt - to 'scare them shitless'. Most of the stories are very funny - in '57% Irish' Ray Brady tries to devise a test of Irishness by measuring reactions to Robbie Keane's goal against Germany in the 2002 World Cup, Riverdance and 'Danny Boy' - others deeply moving. And best of all, in the title story itself,Jimmy Rabbitte, the man who formed The Commitments, decides it's time to find a new band, and this time no White Irish need apply. Multicultural to a fault, The Deportees specialise not in soul music this time, but the songs of Woody Guthrie."

Roddy Doyle (Author), Hugh Lee (Narrator)

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Audiobooks by Roddy Doyle

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