Paula Spencer

Roddy Doyle

Feb 2018 · Blackstone Publishing · Narrated by Ger Ryan

About this audiobook

Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Having outlived an abusive husband and father, Paula and her four children are now struggling to live their adult lives, with two of the kids balancing their own addictions. Paula rebuilds her life slowly. As she goes about her daily routine working as a cleaning woman, and cooking for her two children at home, she re-establishes connections with her two sisters, her mother, and grandchildren, expanding her world. Doyle has movingly depicted a woman, both strong and fragile, who is fighting back and finally equipped to be a mother to her children.

About the author

Roddy Doyle is the author of ten acclaimed novels, several collections of stories, and several works for children and young adults. In 2009 he received the Irish PEN Award for Literature. The Commitments was made into a motion picture in 1991, and Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha won the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award. The Van was a finalist for the Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin where he was born in 1958.

Ger Ryan is an Irish film and television actress whose credits include Queer as Folk (UK version), The War of the Buttons (the 1995 Irish version), The Van, Moll Flanders, Driftwood, A Love Divided, and Intermission. She also played Paula Spencer in Roddy Doyle’s acclaimed series Family for the BBC.