Oh, Play That Thing

Description

It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe. Henry Smart, on the run from Dublin, fails on his feet. He is a handsome man with a sandwich board, behind which he stashes hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. He catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district and soon there are eyes on his back and men in the shadows. It is time to leave, for another America- Chicago is wild and new, and newest of all is the music. Furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. His music is everywhere, coming from every open door, every phonograph. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his colour; there are places a black man cannot go, things he cannot do. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of nine acclaimed novels including the Barrytown Trilogy, two collections of short stories, Rory & Ita, a memoir about his parents, Two Pints, a collection of dialogues, and most recently, The Guts, which saw the return of Jimmy Rabbitte from The Commitments. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

"The words crackle and fizz - a dazzling evocation of the Jazz Age... Magical and marvellous" Independent on Sunday "A virtuoso of the sentence...Doyle wonderfully recreates a world of flophouses and speakeasies, flappers and bootleggers" Guardian "Doyle's performance is, again, extraordinary for the richness of allusion, the facility with which history is dovetailed with invention, the energy of the prose" Daily Telegraph "Brilliantly imagined... Utterly magnificent, the finest work he has done" Sunday Tribune "Kicks off at a furious lick and just gets faster, hotter, louder. Hugely, unremittingly entertaining" Scotsman