This is a great book. At one level, two old school friends who now see each other rarely, go out for a meal in Dublin on a sunny evening in May and end up on a monumental pub crawl. But, at another, it’s a masterful analysis of the male capacity, or probably incapacity, to love and be loved. David now lives in England but he has come back to visit, and to care for, his terminally ill father in his last few months. Joe has never left Dublin. As they eat and drink, a series of memories are trawled after Joe reveals that he has left his wife Trish and his children after meeting a woman called Jessica at a school parents’ evening. Both men knew Jessica thirty-seven years before as somehow both an object of desire and unattainable. As the story unfolds, events in their past lives are revisited. There are gaps in the narratives, misunderstandings of what happened and why, as over a consistent supply of beer, any number of Dublin pubs and many hours they explore who they were and what they have become. Joe loves Jessica because it seems that they should always have been together but there are hints that he is recapturing a lost past and she is a lonely middle-aged woman. There’s somehow not enough passion. To be with her he has abandoned Trish, their children and what appears to be a comfortable and happy life. Is he suffering from a midlife crisis or has he really encountered an overwhelming and irresistible love. You decide. He still loves Trish but then he doesn’t and then maybe he thinks he loves her in a new way. Neither she nor the children are impressed! Davey is now forced to think about his relationship with Faye, a strident and forthright Dublin woman who seemed to have selected him as her partner. He loves her now out of habit but she has let him come to Dublin alone so perhaps that isn’t enough and he also loves his father but that love is tainted by guilt over their past relationship and a feeling that he has misunderstood and ignored the old man. As the story unravels you get the sense that love for Trish and Faye, in spite of their very different personalities and backgrounds, is somehow straightforward while for the two men approaching old age it’s confused. Did they ever love unreservedly? Did they miss out on some ground passion? They can’t help wondering… It’s a book which poses questions for male readers of a certain age and it might help the women who are married to them! You have to get over the book’s tendency to flick backwards and forwards and you could have something of a thick head from the alcoholic fumes and the Irish dialects but it’s a fabulous read and well worth searching out. (Love is published by Jonathan Cape. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy exchange for a fair review.)

Roddy Doyle’s Love is about the word in the title. Davy is back in Dublin having moved to London when he married. He and Joe, a friend from his youth, meet up as they’ve clearly done through the years. Time has estranged them; they have a superficial understanding of each others lives and now find themselves approaching sixty with grown families. It seems they meet up out of politeness, the friendship apparently running on empty, Davy suggests this will be the last time he’ll come to back to Dublin, to meet Joe. This time though, as the story emerges, they both have secrets they’ll share. It all starts when they agree to have “one more” which leads them on an odyssey through their youth. The book is written in Doyle’s usual style, it’s almost entirely dialogue between the two men with Davy filling in some details as the narrator, offering some context of their relationship as they move from dinner to a crawl through Dublin’s pubs. It moves along at a fair pace and twists and turns. There are regular humour and laughs, and plenty of the local vernacular, but this is a serious story of how men become friends and why those friendships endure, it deals with the often different viewpoints two people can have of the same memory and the difference in perception of where power lies in all relationships. The dialogue is authentic and conforms to the adage that men struggle to talk about their feelings, Joe spends most of the book trying to explain why he’s left his wife, the cause coming from the glory days of Davy and Joe’s almost forgotten youth, while frustrating Davy with his inaccurate and often confused words and half-hearted justifications. The story winds along as they move from pub to pub, the two drifting together and apart, but never far apart to call it a night. We spend most of the book exploring Joe’s story but it’s when Davy’s reasons for being in Dublin come out that the bonds formed so long ago, around special places and special people, that the book finally settles on the meaning of the word in the title.

Well, this was unlike any book I have read before. Joe and Davy meet in a pub and talk, and talk, and drink, and talk some more, and have another drink. During their night of drinking Joe tells Davy that he has left his wife for the girl they both knew (and fancied) some decades ago. Davy is visiting Ireland after settling in England years ago. Mainly to visit his Dad. His wife Faye isn't with him though. We learn more of their joint and separate pasts from their musings and anecdotes along the way, also with Davy's narration and inner thoughts. It's mostly dialogue - with inner musings and flashbacks interspersed throughout, the ramblings become less coherent with the increasing alcohol intake but it always stays on the right side of making sense. It's sad in places, happy in others and very poignant all the way through. I hadn't read the synopsis carefully before diving in so I really wasn't prepared for what happened at the end and I think I am better off for that. It's not a book with a beginning, middle and end, in the traditional sense. It sort of jumps right in, meanders around a bit and then finds its way better towards the end. I understand that this might not appeal to many but, for me, the way it has been written fits the story being told. I also think that it would definitely work better on a screen and I can't help thinking that the author had the screenplay in mind whilst writing this book. Peppered through with some delicious, occasionally dark, humour, the characters do a good job of keeping things moving. It does drag a bit at times but it is worth persevering with and getting to the end.

This was my first Roddy Doyle and it won’t be the last! Such fantastic writing . The synopsis may appear a bit dull to some , two men sat in a pub reminiscing about their friendship but don’t be fooled .. The reader I sent taken on a journey with the men and I soon felt as if I was actually sat in the pub wit them . It is set over one afternoon but drifts back to the 80s which I loved , the banter between them is brilliant , full of humour and wit and it’s very addictive. . Thank you netgalley for this arc.

'There is a reason why men don't talk about their feelings. It's not just that it's difficult, or embarrassing. It's almost impossible. The words aren't really there.' Old friends Davy and Joe meet up in Dublin for one hell of a pub crawl. Over the course of the day they both face up to their lives and what has changed: for Joe it is trying to explain how he has come to leave his wife and start a relationship with a woman whom, as younger men, they both loved; for Davy, he has come back to Ireland from his home in England to be with his father, dying from cancer. As the drink flows, and memories from their lives weave together with their current situation, the dialogue becomes more elusive, the truth harder to grasp. This is a strong, almost visceral novel from Roddy Doyle. It reads, mostly, like a film or stage script, very much focused on dialogue with little or no description. As the two men both resume the dynamics of their old friendship, and try to deal with the changes since they last met, there is a lot of discussion about relationships, male friendship and family responsibilities. Once you can get your ear attuned to the dialogue, and stop necessarily trying to work out exactly who is speaking at any given moment, then you find yourself immersed in this friendship. But - ah yes, the but - this, by the very nature of how Doyle has written the book, has to be compared to other recent Irish novels where dialogue dominates the book. All Irish writers stand in the long shadow of those titans who came before them - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett. In novels, this dialogue-led form has most recently been seen in Conor O'Callaghan's 'We Are Not in the World' (where a father and daughter drive through France), and of course last year's Booker-nominated 'Night Boat to Tangier' by Kevin Barry. The latter, in particular, gives a fantastic point of comparison, being pretty much a conversation between two late-middle-aged men about relationships, family etc. For me, this just doesn't have the emotional impact of Conor O'Callaghan's book, and certainly doesn't stand up against the sublime writing of Kevin Barry. Somehow, the characters of Joe and Davy just didn't come together for me, and the only real emotional impact came right at the end with a (perhaps too contrived?) conclusion. It's good, but it's not great. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because, yes, Doyle can write sentences that punch you in the gut and make you realise how good he is. At points he just gets what it is to be a certain kind of man: 'We were glowing - I was sure we were glowing. We were fresh again, young again, hilarious. In the world of men - even though there were more women in the place than men. And that, somehow, made it even more a world of men. We were the men at the bar. He drank. He swallowed. - Good pint. - Good pint. - Good pub. - Very good pub. - Good to be here. - Yeah.'