Bullfighting

Bullfighting is Roddy Doyle's second collection of stories: a series of bittersweet tales about men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today.

The men in Bullfighting are each concerned with loss in different ways—of their place in their world, of power, virility, love—of the boom days in Ireland's recent history and the Celtic Tiger. "The stories, his memories, were wearing out," the narrator of the title story thinks, "and there was nothing new replacing them."

The stories move from classrooms to crematoriums, local pubs to bullrings; featuring an array of men at their working day and at rest, taking stock and reliving past glories. In the first, "Recuperation," a man sets off for a prescribed walk around his neighbourhood, the… Keep Reading