'It is 1968. Paddy Clarke is ten
years old, breathless with discovery. He reads with a child's voraciousness, collecting facts the way adults collect grey hairs and parking tickets. Doyle captures the specch patterns of childhood brilliantly, the weird logic of the incessant _ questions, the non-sequiturs and wonderments.. Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. This is one of the most compelling novels Fve read in ages, a triumph of style and perception Joseph OConnor, Irish Times
Truthful, hilarious, painfully sad' Tom Shone, Spectator
'A superb recreation of a childhood" Dermot Bolger
Gloriously triumphant... confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation NickHornby, Literary Review