Funny books to read and buy for Christmas gifts

Funny books of 2024

Reading lists

Books guaranteed to make you laugh

A host of short story collections photographed against a red background

Short_stories_2022_1800_1200

12 short story collections to sink into

Stories

Life Without Children

The exhilarating new short story collection from the Booker Prize-winning author

A quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid... Silver linings have been hard to find lately, but in Life Without Children Doyle has given us just that

[A] gem of a collection... Roddy Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers, but he has lately put his gifts to use in painting a picture of characters in...their "third age".

Quietly devastating... Doyle's clipped, plain dialogue shivers with emotion.

Life Without Children...displays Doyle's remarkable talent for conveying the strongest of emotions in the simplest of words and the shortest of sentences... It bristles with quietly sharp insights into the shape of a human life.

There is an immediacy to the stories in Life Without Children, an emotional charge that comes with writing in real time, and an optimism too. In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection.

Moving...[and] beautiful in its brevity.

A treat for fans of the Booker Prize-winning Irish author... the darkness of the stories, Doyle's lyrical style of wit, passion, and occasional obscene outbursts, shine through... wonderfully uplifting.

As always, Doyle has a great ear for the cadences of Dublin speech, finding humour in even the bleakest situations.

Love and marriage, children and family, death and grief. Life touches everyone the same, but living under lockdown? It changes us alone. 
 
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. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet. 
 
'Life Without Children is boldly exhilarating, with its revelations of quiet love and the sheer charm of the characters' voices' Sunday Times 
 
'Quietly devastating...shivers with emotion' Financial Times 
 
'In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection' Observer 
 
'Moving...and beautiful' Daily Mail

Love

A masterful novel about coming-of-age and finding love in Dublin’s pubs, from the Booker-winning Roddy Doyle

Masterly... A first-rate novel about the different bonds between men and the ineffable mysteries of love.

Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue... And there is beauty and compassion in Mr Doyle's sculpted, spare writing. Among all the banter and gags he manages to articulate feelings that are rarely expressed so fittingly... Love is a reminder that its author is one to treasure.

Fast-paced and deceptively easy to read... Goes down as smoothly as gulps of beer.

Love is altogether spellbinding... The whole book is audacious, richly layered and often comic, but ultimately deeply moving... Move over Socrates and watch an Irish master of dialogue at work.

So perfectly constructed it is hard to believe it is really just about two old school friends getting drunk, and drunker... [Love] seems to bottle what male friendship can be like.

Here is a paean to all things Irish. Fans of [Doyle] will be glad to follow old mates Davy and Joe through a pub crawl that is both elegiac and hilarious.

Sharp, funny... Easy to read, hard to forget.

A praise-song to the Irish pub... The reader is dropped into the familiar, perfect rhythm of Roddy Doyle's effortless dialogue...good humour and camaraderie.

No one does boozy male regret better than Doyle, and he's on typically fluent form in this slow-burn tale of two old friends... A narrative engine that Doyle has perfected over decades.

Roddy Doyle might be our greatest poet of the pub... Love, his 11th novel, makes the pub not just the instrument but the object of affection. In structure, it is a bar crawl; in substance, it is a love letter.

Doyle puts feeling first in this novel by putting it last, in the final pages... In the end, you see that the sacred world of the two friends was lurking in all that preceded this final scene.

[A] witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt... This one is a winner.

Love by Roddy Doyle weaves memory and fiction as two childhood friends reunite over pints and revisit the vagaries of their youth. Read it if you cry-laughed through The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe and tittered at Steve Coogan's The Trip.

Roddy Doyle has never lacked ambition, writing complex novels that appear straightforward: heavy on the dialogue, simple in the language, deep in the lives of ordinary working people... [Love's] effect is devastating.

Deeply moving... [Doyle is] an exceptionally gifted writer... Wonderful.

Doyle is so adept a writer... [Love is] exhilarating.

Doyle's fast-paced, dialogue-driven style is so real it feels like you're eavesdropping on the conversation. He captures the heartbreak and humour of long-term friendship exceptionally and ends the book with a tenderness that will take your breath away. It's wonderful.

There are frequent flashes of humour, always part of the fabric of Doyle's work, music references galore...and moments of poignant nostalgia, especially about the joy of falling in love for the first time... [Love is] tender, moving.

Roddy Doyle is one of the most recognisable faces - and voices - in Irish literature.

Fizzing dialogue...bawdy humour, nostalgia for times gone by, and a deeply moving ending.

A tangled and mesmeric novel that consists entirely of conversation which is about all the things that don't need to be spoken and the things that can't be said.

[A] tender, funny novel about love, loss and male friendship.

With each new novel, Roddy Doyle’s work grows deeper and more contemplative. Love is a profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality

'A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality' John Boyne 
 
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. 
 
 As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them - the pubs, the parties, the broken hearts and bungled affairs - the men find themselves face-to-face with the realities of friendship.

The Complete Two Pints

Roddy Doyle's complete Two Pints series - collected in paperback for the first time, and now with the Two Pints play script

Funny, provocative and never less than entertaining

Topical and irreverent... Roddy Doyle's impressive comic skills keep the laughter coming

Savagely funny, occasionally inspired, and alomst poetic in their rhythm, speed and economy

Two men meet for a pint in a Dublin pub... 
 
In 2012, Roddy Doyle showed us the world anew: through the back-and-forth of two Dublin pub-dwellers. They chewed the fat, set the world to rights, slagged each other unmercifully. And along the way, they chased the ebb and flow and stupidity of the year right to the bottom of their pints. 
 
Today, they're still at it - even over Zoom, if needs be. Collected for the first time, here is almost a decade's worth of elections and referendums, births and deaths, football, financial crashes, pandemics and the philosophical questions of life, as told through the wit and warmth of Roddy Doyle's comic genius. 
 
Includes: Two Pints, Two More Pints, Two for the Road - and, for the first time in print, Two Pints: The Play and The Zoom Pints

Charlie Savage

A refreshingly positive take on middle age, it’s optimistic, warm-hearted, blokishly moving and written with a master’s pin-sharp command of humour… a book that’s sure to be picked up and revisited time and time again.

More than comedy or insight, this work has tenderness… It does more than tickle our bellies, it warms our hearts.

Brilliantly funny. Heart-warmingly, vulnerably hilarious in fact. Doyle has crafted Charlie Savage with great care and has imbued him with such depth of character that I can’t imagine a reader finishing the book without loving him, just a little… savour every page because Charlie Savage will enrich your life as long as he is in it.

This portrait of an ordinary man (and one clearly past his best) is by turns hilarious and heartfelt.

Savage is likeable and bumbling and Doyle’s voice is spot on for [this] persona.

Meet Charlie Savage. 
 
Charlie is a middle-aged Dubliner with an indefatigable wife, an exasperated daughter, a drinking buddy who’s realised that he’s been a woman all along … 
 
Compiled here for the first time is a whole year’s worth of Roddy Doyle’s hilarious series for the Irish Independent. Giving a unique voice to the everyday, he draws a portrait of a man – funny, loyal, somewhat bewildered – trying to keep pace with the modern world (if his knees don’t give out first). 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE FOR COMIC WRITING 2019 
 
'A delight from start to finish' Irish Mail on Sunday

Two for the Road

Another round of two pints from the ever-brilliant, always hilarious imagination of Roddy Doyle

These short, punchy sketches are wickedly funny, oddly affecting and completely life-affirming.

Very funny... The kind of book that you read in public at your own risk

The next round in the beloved Two Pints series from the ever-brilliant, always hilarious imagination of bestselling author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 
 
Two men meet for a pint - or three - in a Dublin pub. They chew the fat, set the world to rights and mourn friends gone: David Bowie, Prince, Princess Leia and Young Frankenstein. Around them the world of Brexit, Trump, and referendums storm, but some things - good things - never change. 
 
Inspired by the last five years of news, Roddy Doyle's Two for the Road offers a strong brew of Roddy Doyle's comic genius - to be downed in one riotous sitting, or savoured over, laugh after laugh.

A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOKER PRIZE GEM

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

A new Vintage Classics edition of Roddy Doyle's beloved prizewinning novel, part of a new set of beautifully presented Irish classics

*A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOKER PRIZE GEM* 
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 1993 
 
Paddy Clarke is ten years old. 
 
Paddy Clarke lights fires. Paddy Clarke's name is written in wet cement all over Barrytown. Paddy Clarke's heroes are Father Damien (and the lepers), Geronimo and George Best. Paddy Clarke knows the exact moment to knock a dead scab from his knee. Paddy Clarke hates his brother Francis because that&rsquo;s the rule. Paddy Clarke loves his Ma and Da, but it seems like they don't love each other, and Paddy wants to understand, but can't.

Gloriously triumphant...confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation

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 speech 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 I've read in ages, a triumph of style and perception

Extraordinary technical achievement and emotional force

One of the truest and funniest presentations of juvenile experience in any recent literature

Roddy Doyle

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives

The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are…such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising

An emotional and moving portrayal of life shaped by past trauma and domestic violence. Doyle’s ability to capture the subtleties of human emotions and relationships is great. His dialogue is spot-on, it’s funny and moving... I loved it

Paula Spencer [is Doyle’s] endlessly resilient, thoughtful and entirely fictional protagonist… [The Women Behind the Door] is possibly Doyle’s most mature, and certainly his most structurally sophisticated [book]

Genuinely devastating... [Paula is] one of Doyle's most gratifyingly human characters yet. She is full to brim of fierce love... Roddy Doyle is the undisputed master of dialogue. The exchanges between his female characters are a delight, packed tight with authenticity and a humour they wear lightly

Lesser novelists would ‘humanise’ Paula with virtue and much curiosity. But the protagonist Doyle gives us is as proud, inane and flawed as she is compassionate, witty and dignified

I don't often cry at books – music is a different matter – but Roddy Doyle did a number on me with The Women Behind the Door this year. He had just made me laugh when suddenly there was a line...that made me well up

The Booker-winning author brings his storytelling genius to a tale about a family in crisis

This is an incredibly affecting third act that brilliantly captures Paula's internal weather, a light-and-shade of devastation and normality... The past will never be past for Paula, but as the reckonings come, it is beginning to be accommodated at last.

Roddy Doyle’s new novel might be the best thing he has written… it’s full of energy and life, it completes a trilogy to read and reread, and it shows us finally, joyously, how, whatever life throws at Paula Spencer, “she’ll manage. She always has.”

[Paula has] a wild and hilarious narrative voice… [and] a gloriously sardonic sense of humour. The book deals with hard times and dark matters, but there’s always light in the writing

Mr Doyle has made his own the gritty world of modern Dublin

Roddy Doyle – the virtuoso of the inner monologue. The author’s genius takes wing in this novel… The novel remains deep inside Paula’s mind – and brilliantly so. I’m willing to bet that what goes on in most of our heads is beautifully captured here

Roddy Doyle has never lacked ambition, writing complex novels that appear straightforward: heavy on the dialogue, simple in the language, deep in the lives of ordinary working people

A masterclass in dialogue from the bard of the bog ordinary

Roddy Doyle has done the impossible - he has made Paula Spencer even more unforgettable the second time round

Doyle has long been praised for his use of vernacular, dialect and slang: talk is at the heart of his work and this book is no exception, whether via the interiority of thought or the audible babble of jokes, jeers, recrimination, fury

Roddy Doyle's greatest gift has always been for dialogue. He can command the full range of Irish voices and registers... Doyle does not abhor sentimentality. A single sentence, a brief exchange, can raise a laugh and a lump in the throat... The wisdom in Doyle’s writing is the wisdom of this acknowledgement: that to wish to be free of everything that makes one prey to sentimentality and cliché is to wish to be free of what makes fiction possible

Doyle has facility for creating characters out of thin air and making them stick. Not to mention the sly humor, the ability to hew to the fine line between pathos and bathos and write unsentimentally about sad people and situations, and the gift for quicksilver dialogue that can sound like a poetic form of vernacular speech... When you put these together with Doyle’s broad range, you’re left feeling close to dazzled... He imparts a sense of poignancy and glimpses of happiness, of grief and loss and small moments of connection

Doyle is justly renowned for his whip-smart dialogue... And there is beauty and compassion in Mr Doyle's sculpted, spare writing. Among all the banter and gags he manages to articulate feelings that are rarely expressed so fittingly

While recognising that we have all sat po-faced through novels which other people have assured us were hilarious... All I can say is that The Snapper creased me up

Gloriously triumphant... Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation

At sixty-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, 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. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside. 
 
That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, 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, they find themselves embracing the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other.

Roddy Doyle

Praise for The Women Behind the Door

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives

The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are…such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising

An emotional and moving portrayal of life shaped by past trauma and domestic violence. Doyle’s ability to capture the subtleties of human emotions and relationships is great. His dialogue is spot-on, it’s funny a ...

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives

The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are…such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising

An emotional and moving portrayal of life shaped by past trauma and domestic violence. Doyle’s ability to capture the subtleties of human emotions and relationships is great. His dialogue is spot-on, it’s funny a ...

The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives

The women in Roddy Doyle’s The Women Behind the Door are…such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising

An emotional and moving portrayal of life shaped by past trauma and domestic violence. Doyle’s ability to capture the subtleties of human emotions and relationships is great. His dialogue is spot-on, it’s funny a ...

Books by Roddy Doyle

Series by Roddy Doyle

Irish Classics

Articles featuring Roddy Doyle

Books guaranteed to make you laugh

12 short story collections to sink into

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