Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of eleven acclaimed novels including The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van, two collections of short stories, Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents, and most recently, The Guts. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
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. -- Justine Jordan * Guardian, Books of the Year * A book that made me feel I really was in the presence of a master. -- Sebastian Barry * 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 -- Mick Brown * 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. -- John Boyne * 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 -- Linda Grant * Daily Telegraph *