Author(s): Roddy Doyle

Fiction

Davy and Joe have got a lot to catch up on.

Drinking pals back in their Dublin days, Davy rarely sees Joe for a pint anymore - maybe one or two when Davy's over from England to check in on his elderly father. But tonight, one pint will turn to three, and then five as Joe recounts a secret, leading the two men on a bender back to the haunts of their youth.

Joe has left his wife and family for another woman, Jessica. Davy knows her too, or he should - she was the girl of their dreams all those years ago, the girl with the cello in George's Pub. As Joe's story unfolds across Dublin - pub after pub - so too do the memories of what eventually drove Davy from Ireland- his first meeting with Faye, the woman that would become his wife, his father's sombre disapproval, the pained spaces left behind when a parent dies.

As much a hymn to the Dublin and the pubs of one's youth as a delightfully comic, yet moving portrait of what it means to try put into words the many forms love can take, Lovemarks a triumphant new turn for Roddy Doyle.