The Guts

“Doyle’s Jimmy Rabbitte reappears, dealing with cancer, mortality, and love. . . . I was undone by the emotional clarity of the writing itself, and by the calm, but never static, way Doyle has of presenting a scene.”
–The New York Times Book Review  

“Quintessential Doyle. . . . both laugh-out-loud funny and disarmingly moving . . . [It] contains some of the snappiest, wittiest, most believable, and exhilarating dialogue in fiction. . . . To make a story about middle-aged men battling cancer a largely effervescent lark without a trace of sentimentality is a notable achievement.”
–The Boston Globe 

 ”Roddy Doyle is a great master of dialogue, which is his narrative medium– the main way he tells. And it’s impossible for anyone, I would think, not to laugh out loud at the wit and shock of it. . . . If [The Guts] has a unifying theme, it is the awareness of death, and the fresh perspective on life thrown by its advancing shadow.”
–The New York Review of Books 

“Doyle’s collected works are a superlative study of family, aging, and the dignity of the working class–and his latest novel is a worthy addition. . . . The novel revisits an area Doyle explored previously in The Van: what it means to be a man at middle age.”
–The Atlantic