At 66, Paula Spencer --- mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor --- has finally started to live her life. She has a job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, her boyfriend Joe is a text away when she needs him, and her four children now have the healthy families and petty dramas that Paula could have only hoped for. But then, her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day. Nicola is everything Paula wasn’t --- independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, a “success” --- but now she is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. She has left her family and come to stay. As Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter must untangle past memory, trauma and revelations to confront what they mean to each other --- and who they want to be.

Love and marriage. Children and family. Death and grief. Life touches everyone the same. But living under lockdown, it changes us alone. In these 10 beautifully moving short stories written mostly 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.

One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Drinking pals back in their youth, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he needs to tell Davy, and Davy has a sorrow he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Joe has left his wife and family 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: his first encounter with Faye, the lively woman who would become his wife; his father's somber disapproval; the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

While at Donnelly’s for his usual pint, Victor Forde is approached by a man in shorts and a pink shirt. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, and also dislikes the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories --- of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and that eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

In the 1980s Jimmy Rabbitte formed the Commitments, a ragtag, blue-collar collective of Irish youths determined to bring the soul music stylings of James Brown and Percy Sledge to Dublin. These days, the almost-50-year-old Jimmy has a loving wife, four kids, and a recent cancer diagnosis that leaves him feeling shattered and frightened. As he battles his illness on his path through Dublin, Jimmy manages to reconnect with his own past.

Anyone looking for a guide to the psyche of the middle-aged man would do much worse than to settle down with Roddy Doyle’s outstanding new collection of 13 stories. Set, with one exception, in present-day Dublin and its environs, they offer the literary equivalent of an MRI of the souls of a troubled, yet sympathetic, group of men. Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg.