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The Women Behind the Door

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The Women Behind the Door

By: Roddy Doyle
Narrated by: Ger Ryan
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About this listen

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 Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Inspiring Funny
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Loved it! I couldn’t stop listening. Such fluent and interesting storytelling, the reader was superb. I want more.

Comforting and entertaining

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Impossible to relate to. Too fragmented. I don't understand what the fuss is about. Sorry I wasted a credit.

Stream of consciousness. No real story

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I understand all the present and past pain that both the women suffered. Paula from the guilt of being an addict and how it affected her family and her abuse at the hands of charlo. And Nichola's memories of her mother's addiction and abuse and how she herself was impacted by it. But I still didn't get a lot of the conversation between them. And I didn't understand why nichola wanted to leave her family and move in with her mother. Roddy does a great job of understanding women and writing the parts for the women, their feelings and their emotions. But as I say I didn't get some of their conversations. Also too much detail of their actions... she lifted the cup, she put the cup back down, she lifted the cup again, she put it back down!..... this book wasn't for me I'm afraid.

The narration

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