Gloriously triumphant...confirms Doyle as the best novelist of his generation

Literary Review

It is 1968. Paddy Clarke is ten years old, breathless with discovery. He reads with a child's voraciousness, collecting facts the way adults collect grey hairs and parking tickets. Doyle captures the speech patterns of childhood brilliantly, the weird logic of the incessant questions, the non-sequiturs and wonderments... Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. This is one of the most compelling novels I've read in ages, a triumph of style and perception

Irish Times

Extraordinary technical achievement and emotional force

- Gillian Beer,

One of the truest and funniest presentations of juvenile experience in any recent literature

- Mick Imlah, Independent

Brimming with sadness, but full of fun

Sunday Times