Oh, Play That Thing
Roddy Doyle
It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe.
Henry Smart, on the run from Dublin, falls on his feet. He is a handsome man with a sandwich board, behind which he stashes hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. He catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district and soon there are eyes on his back and men in the shadows. It is time to leave, for another America...
Chicago is wild and new, and newest of all is the music.
Furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. His music is everywhere, coming from every open door, every phonograph. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his colour; there are places a black man cannot go, things he cannot do. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.
Product Details
About Roddy Doyle
Reviews for Oh, Play That Thing
Independent on Sunday
A virtuoso of the sentence...Doyle wonderfully recreates a world of flophouses and speakeasies, flappers and bootleggers
Guardian
Doyle's performance is, again, extraordinary for the richness of allusion, the facility with which history is dovetailed with invention, the energy of the prose
Daily Telegraph
Brilliantly imagined... Utterly magnificent, the finest work he has done
Sunday Tribune
Kicks off at a furious lick and just gets faster, hotter, louder. Hugely, unremittingly entertaining
Scotsman
Sequels often disappoint, but here is one that's every bit as sharp, as surprising and as satisfying as the original
Guardian
An exciting, fast-moving narrative
Times Literary Supplement