After the disappointment of last year’s Paula Spencer, Roddy Doyle’s unnecessary sequel to The Woman Who Walked Into Walls, it hardly gladdens the heart to discover that his new book, The Deportees (a collection of short stories initially written in 800-word chunks for an Irish-based multicultural newspaper), includes a sequel to his 1987 debut, The Commitments. Although there are many famous examples of successful serialised fiction, most recent examples (Ronan Bennett’s Zugzwang) haven’t worked, as few modern authors share Dickens’s storytelling skill. 

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