X-Book

Smile

Click Buy to Log in and see personalised pricing.

Send as a gift Get in the xigxag app
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s pub for a pint, a slow one.

One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick.

Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers.He prompts other memories too – of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio.

But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control - and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.

© Roddy Doyle 2017 (P) Penguin Audio 2017

Critics Review

Roddy Doyle excelled himself… A typically bittersweet novella about a middle-aged man’s memories of his schooldays which pulls the rug shockingly from under the reader’s feet.
Guardian, Books of the Year
A book that made me feel I really was in the presence of a master.
Observer
Reading Smile, one is swept along – as in all Doyle’s novels – by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head… Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed
Daily Telegraph
Terribly moving and even, at times, distressing, while saving its greatest surprise until the end… There is a brave and complex ending to the novel… It will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself.
Guardian
Smile turns out to be a novel of literary deception and self-deception, of suppression, guilt, fantasy and the deep damage that leaves a mind profoundly disordered… I suspect Smile will become a bestseller
Daily Telegraph
Dramatically pulls the rug from under the reader with a final image not just of one damaged man, but of an impotent country poisoned to the core by a history that it cannot shake off. It left me with goosebumps and, a week on, a sour, sad taste still in my mouth.
Daily Mail
The cocktail of dark subject matter and colloquial, humorous dialogue is quintessential Doyle, and this engrossing tale, shot through with pathos, sees him back to his best.
Mail on Sunday
His command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding… An absorbing and expertly told story.
Financial Times
Doyle is one of the best writers of dialogue we have, using it with humour and drama.
New Statesman
His novels fizz with demotic zing, comic phrasing and the back-and-forth of Irish chat.
The Times
Author Roddy Doyle
Narrator Roddy Doyle
Duration 5 hours and 3 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473549371
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Modern and contemporary fiction
Availability AU, GB, IE

More from the same

Author

Narrator

About xigxag

xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK’s only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.

There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at £8.99. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from £3.99. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.

Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.

Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.