Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old working-class woman struggling to reclaim her dignity after marriage to an abusive husband and a worsening drinking problem. Paula recalls her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with Charlo, and the marriage to him that left her feeling powerless. Capturing both her vulnerability and her strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is real and unforgettable.

Picking up nearly ten years after the tale, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Dublin widow Paula begins her fifth month of sobriety while endeavoring to raise the two children who are still at home, an endeavor during which she struggles to make ends meet, attends parent-teacher conferences, and develops a taste for rock music. 50,000 first printing.

Booker\-Prize winner Roddy Doyle’s spectacular return to his iconic character, Paula Spencer, whom he originated in the groundbreaking The Woman Who Walked into Doors and its follow\-up, Paula Spencer'The undisputed laureate of ordinary lives'SUNDAY TIMES'The best novelist of his generation'NICK HORNBY, author of High FidelityAt sixty\-six, Paula Spencer – mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor – is finally living her life. A job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, a man – Joe – with whom she shares what she wants, friends who see her for who she is, and four grown children, now with families and petty dramas the likes of which Paula could only have hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.That is until Paula’s eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep. Independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, “a success” – Nicola is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. Over the next few days, as Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter find themselves untangling anecdotes, jokes, memory and revelation to confront the bruised but beautiful symmetry of what each means to the other.The next sequence in the life of Roddy Doyle’s quietly remarkable, ever\-memorable Paula Spencer, The Women Behind the Door is a delicately devastating portrait of shame and the inescapable shadow it casts over families.