--Victor? I looked up when I heard when I heard my name but I couldn't see a thing. I was sitting near the open door and the light coming through was a solid sheet between me and whoever had spoken. My eyes were watering a bit - they did that. I often felt that they were melting slowly in my head. --Am I right? It was a man. My own age, judging by the shape, the black block he was making in front of me now, and the slight rattle of middle age in his voice. I put the cover over the screen of my iPad. I'd been looking at my wife's Facebook page. I could see him now. There were two men on the path outside, smoking, and they'd stood together in the way of the sun. I didn't know him. --Yes, I said. --I thought so, he said.--Jesus. For fuck sake. I didn't know what to do. --It must be - fuckin' - forty years, he said.--Thirty-seven or -eight, anyway. You haven't changed enough, Victor. It's not fair, so it isn't. Mind if I join you? I don't want to interrupt anything. He sat on a stool in fr

"A breakout from the Booker-prize-winning novelist Roddy Doyle. A psychological suspense novel unlike any he's written before, about how we contend with the past, trauma, guilt and regret, and the uncertainty of memory. Who is unreliable? Just moved in to a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly's pub for a pint, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor's name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories too--of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor's own small claim to fame, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio. But it's the memories of high school, and of one particular Brother, that he cannot control and which eventua