Roddy Doyle excelled himself... A typically bittersweet novella about a middle-aged man's memories of his schooldays which pulls the rug shockingly from under the reader's feet.
Justine Jordan
Guardian, Books of the Year
A book that made me feel I really was in the presence of a master.
Sebastian Barry
Observer
... Read more Reading Smile, one is swept along - as in all Doyle's novels - by the vibrancy of the language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head... Smile is beautifully written, and beautifully observed
Mick Brown
Daily Telegraph
Terribly moving and even, at times, distressing, while saving its greatest surprise until the end... There is a brave and complex ending to the novel... It will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader's sense of ease and the nature of the form itself.
John Boyne
Guardian
Smile turns out to be a novel of literary deception and self-deception, of suppression, guilt, fantasy and the deep damage that leaves a mind profoundly disordered... I suspect Smile will become a bestseller
Linda Grant
Daily Telegraph
Show Less