The Guts

Product DescriptionLONGLISTED 2015  – International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award A triumphant return to the characters of Booker Prize-winning writer Roddy Doyle's breakout first novel, The Commitments, now older, wiser, up against cancer and midlife. Jimmy Rabbitte is back. The man who invented the Commitments back in the 1980s is now 47, with a loving wife, 4 kids...and bowel cancer. He isn't dying, he thinks, but he might be.Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle--his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay money online for their resurrected singles and albums. On his path through Dublin, between chemo and work he meets two of the Commitments--Outspan Foster, whose own illness is probably terminal, and Imelda Quirk, still as gorgeous as ever. He is reunited with his long-lost brother, Les, and learns to play the trumpet....This warm, funny novel is about friendship and family, about facing death and opting for life. It climaxes in one of the great passages in Roddy Doyle's fiction: 4 middle-aged men at Ireland's hottest rock festival watching Jimmy's son's band, Moanin' at Midnight, pretending to be Bulgarian and playing a song called "I'm Goin' to Hell" that apparently hasn't been heard since 1932.... Why? You'll have to read The Guts to find out.From Booklist*Starred Review* “Jimmy noticed how much he liked old songs that he’d always thought were shite. Decades of solid opinion were turning to mush.” Happily married, with four great kids and a dream job, Jimmy Rabbitte may have mellowed just a bit since his days managing the Commitments (The Commitments, 1989). However, a diagnosis of bowel cancer makes him reflective, even a little nostalgic. Jimmy finds that his gallows humor doesn’t go over well with his kids, who act out in response to their da’s condition. For Jimmy, everything is “grand,” even when it isn’t. Booker Prize winner Doyle revisits the Rabbitte family of his Barrytown trilogy—now with 25 members attending Christmas—along with its at-times incomprehensible North Dublin dialogue. Doyle expertly evokes the generational confusion over new technologies (especially texting), the sentimentality of children growing up way too fast, and the sobering fear and anxiety of living with a potentially fatal disease—all this without being overly morbid or maudlin and while maintaining his trademark soft touch. Jimmy and the lads do, however, find a little of the “oul” edge when they attend the Electric Picnic festival, even as “they’d been tamed by age. Making sure they didn’t get damp, looking for places to put the litter.” Cameos from The Commitments include the long-lusted-after Imelda and Outspan, “losing the fight” with lung cancer. High-Demand Backstory: This continuation of the popular Jimmy Rabbitte story has its own built-in promotion. --Ben SegedinReviewINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERWINNER 2013 – Eason Novel of the Year (Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards)“The Commitments have returned to haunt our middle age. The financial challenges, health woes and marital quandaries of mid-life have rarely been this funny or this touching.” —Don Gillmor, author of Mount Pleasant“A warm comedy about mortality, nostalgia, friendship and family life.” —The Guardian “It’s easy now to forget just what an impact...[The Commitments] and its two successors had on an Irish reading public.... Their existence had largely been ignored in 20th Century Irish literature and it was Doyle’s great achievement that he not only gave them voice but made them his abiding subject. And he did this without a trace of condescension.... There’s a lot that’s entertaining about The Guts, not least its sardonic soundbites...and there’s much wry commentary, too.” —John Boland, Irish Independent“Characters so present you could pinch yourself black and blue and they’d still be standing right there in front of you. Sad, saucy, lyrical, hilarious, tragic, honest and wise. Put on your c