Start with The Commitments. A group of north Dublin kids form a soul band, it is told almost entirely in dialogue, it is very funny, and it is about 140 pages. Doyle originally self-published it. Nothing else in his work will tell you so quickly whether the voice is for you.
It beats the obvious alternative, which is Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — the Booker winner and the book most likely to be recommended by someone who has read one Doyle novel. That is a better book, and it is also a bleaker and more claustrophobic one, narrated by a ten-year-old who does not understand what he is describing. Meeting Doyle there gives no sense of the comic writer who came first, and the comedy is what makes the later cruelty land.
The Barrytown Trilogy, in order
Three comic novels following one north Dublin family, the Rabbittes, and they have an internal sequence that the film adaptations scrambled badly — the films appeared in a different order and with cast changes, which is why readers routinely start in the wrong place.
The Commitments is first: the band, the auditions, the collapse.
The Snapper is second. Sharon Rabbitte is pregnant and will not say by whom. It is the best of the three and the warmest thing Doyle has written — a comedy about a family absorbing a scandal, in which almost nobody behaves as badly as they might.
The Van is third. Two unemployed friends buy a chip van during Italia 90. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it is the point at which the comedy starts to hurt: the jokes keep coming and the friendship underneath them is dying.
Read all three or read The Snapper alone. What you should not do is read The Van first, because its ending depends on a friendship established across the two books before it.
The Booker winner
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a ten-year-old narrating his parents' marriage failing, in a voice that registers everything and understands none of it. It won the Booker Prize in 1993; our catalogue record carries a wrong year, so ignore the date on the listing. It is the bridge between the comic novels and everything after, and it is the one to read third or fourth, not first.
The dark turn
The woman who walked into doors gives Paula Spencer, an alcoholic, the story of her marriage and what her husband did to her. It is the same Dublin ear — the same rhythm, the same refusal to explain — turned on domestic violence without a trace of sentimentality. It is his best novel and a genuinely hard read, in that order of importance.
Smile is short: a man is accosted by someone who claims to remember him from school. The ending divided readers completely on publication, and saying anything more about it would spoil the only thing worth arguing about.
The historical novel
A star called Henry follows a Dublin slum child who becomes an IRA assassin through the Easter Rising and the War of Independence. It is a deliberate demolition of the heroic national story, and it opens a trilogy about Henry Smart. Read it last: it is the furthest from the voice you started with, and it makes most sense once you know how Doyle writes Dublin in the present tense.
Where to stop
The Commitments, The Snapper and The woman who walked into doors is the honest three-book education — the comedy, the warmth and the cruelty. Add Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha for the prize-winner. Everything else is for readers who want the full range. More on the Roddy Doyle hub.
Follow the full ordered path here: Roddy Doyle Reading Order: The Barrytown Trilogy and What Comes After.
