Virtual Event: Roddy Doyle

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes beloved writer RODDY DOYLE—author of the Booker Prize–winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha—for a discussion of his latest novel, Love. He will be joined in conversation by JOHN FREEMAN, executive editor of Literary Hub and founder and editor of the celebrated literary annual, Freeman's.

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About Love

Davy and Joe were drinking pals back in their Dublin youth. Davy rarely sees Joe for a pint anymore—maybe one or two when Davy comes over from England to check on his elderly father. But tonight Davy's father is dying in the hospice, and Joe has a secret that will lead the two on a bender back to the haunts of their youth.

Joe had left his wife and family a year earlier for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or should—she was the girl of their dreams four decades earlier, the girl with the cello in George's pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin—pint after pint, pub after pub—so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland: the upheaval that Faye, his feisty, profane wife, would bring into his life; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

As much a hymn to the Dublin of old as a delightfully comic yet moving portrait of what it means to try to put into words the many forms that love can take, Love marks a triumphant new turn for Roddy Doyle.

Praise for Love

“This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle dramatizes language’s inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart . . . [T]he two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] freewheeling tale of longtime mates Joe and Davy . . . As the two track back through the years of their marriages, a mixture of regret and melancholy permeates what's both spoken and left unspoken. And, yet, at the end of this long night's journey into day, we are buoyed against the sadness by what is finally a portrait of love in the face of life.” —Booklist