

Charlie Savage by Roddy Doyle: Grand
It’s been a while since I had so much fun reading words on a page (Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind springs to mind). I literally had to put this book down a few times while I bent over double laughing and reached for a tissue to mop up the tears. Humour is a difficult act to pull off effectively in any medium, but Roddy Doyle does a marvellous job in this collection of weekly columns for the Irish Independent, written by his middle-aged, salt-of-the-earth, fictional Dubl