| Summary: |
"Two old friends reconnect in Dublin for a dramatic, revealing evening of confidences and catching up in this captivating new book from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Two friends meet for dinner on the north side of Dublin. David has been living for 25 years in England, where he and his wife moved after getting married in order to put some distance between themselves and his family and the ghosts of hers. Joe married, stayed in Dublin, and is now a father with an estranged wife and children. As their evening together begins Joe begins to tell David about an encounter he has had with a woman from their pasts. The woman was a beautiful, elusive acquaintance from their twenties with whom they both were half in love, mostly from afar. Joe has run into her at his children's high school, and his story unfolds from there. Davy listens barely suppressing a rush of emotions--rage, curiosity and repulsion, as the evening wears on, and Joe explains how this chance encounter in a school hallway has led to the dissolution of his marriage, and all that implies. The evening progresses through numerous pints, each pair the last two drinks they'll have for the evening, and as they move from dinner to the pub and to yet another, nearing the centre of town and George's--the pub of their heyday--the focus turns to Davy's life. And the friends' dance of telling and listening shifts when Davy finally reveals some of what he's been holding back, the crisis he is actually in the midst of, and from which he's taken this one evening as a break away from. A delightfully gritty, yet tender portrait of what it means to try to put into words the many forms love can take, Love marks a triumphant new turn for Roddy Doyle."-- |
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