There are 2, maybe 3 stories worth reading in this. One of them is only 4 pages long so I struggle to call it a story in principle.
All the stories feature old white male perspectives. (Cause we need more of them?) And in almost every instance we were supposed to feel badly for the lead man because he wasn’t really a great person or had ‘lost touch’ with why he was living. I have a very hard time with this idea as it just feels like an excuse to allow the old white man to keep treating people like crap (and a fair few of these characters are awful).
There’s really nothing here special. Certainly most stories had COVID lockdown elements shoved in (as though to meet a marketing need). I know we will have lots of COVID stories in the future and I’m confident all of them will be better than this one.
With one exception, art from masks stuck to your body… pretty damn cute, funny, and poignant all at once.

Please note: I received an eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an honest and unbiased review.

Roddy Doyle has been on my radar since the 80s, but I have never read one of his books before. I started The Woman Who Walked Into Doors for a book club a few years back, but found it too depressing to finish.

The stories in Life Without Children are also depressing, but mostly because the context is too fresh. This is what it has been like to live in lockdown throughout the Covid pandemic. Someone reading these stories in the future will be able to feel in painful detail the way this pandemic has changed the world and isolated us from each other. Reading it right now might be a little too real.

Reading this collection has made me want to read more of Doyle's work. He is a talented writer with the ability to bring people and places to life on the page. This book was excellent, and I'm glad I read it. I only wish I had been able to read it as purely fiction instead of the terrible reality it portrays.

Thank you Knopf Canada and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this book.

No one writes like Doyle. I was very pleased to be granted this book via #netgalley Having read the title story, Life Without Children, I started to burn through the rest of the stories here. Then I slowed down. This is, truly, what Doyle's writing deserves - some focus and patience. Even while his stories (and novels) drive you headfirst towards the end, they grow and add deeper meaning when taken one at a time, and read slowly.

Honestly, if you like Doyle, get this. If you like good writing, get this. If you want to try and figure out what has happened to us all over the past year and a half, get this. It's a remarkable book by one of our greatest writers.

Life Without Children is a book that I’m glad exists. According to an interview in The New Yorker with author Roddy Doyle on his inspiration for writing a collection of (mostly) pandemic-themed stories: "I’d been working on a novel — I’d just started it. It’s set in the present day, and I realized, as I tried to continue work on it, that I didn’t know what the present day was. It wasn’t the thing it had been two weeks before, or even two days before. I decided to set it aside, and I thought that short stories might be the way to capture the moments I was now witnessing." Masks and hand sanitiser, 2m personal distancing and 2km travel zones, essential workers and zoom meetings, they’re all in this collection. Told primarily from the POVs of grumpy old men, these are stories of adult children giving up their leases to move home (which, generally, delight their Dads), partners in their “third age” rediscovering each other, dogs with human names, craft beer with clever names, and so many cyclists in lycra (actually, the collection begins and ends with collisions between pedestrians and cyclists — with a truly tragic such accident referenced along the way — so perhaps this is Doyle’s own greatest of grumpy old man pet peeves). And again, I’m so glad that this exists: Each of Doyle’s stories contain nice little slice of life moments, enjoyable in their own right, but taken together, they represent a valuable artifact of our pandemic experience; I reckon this collection will become even more valuable as time passes and memories fade.