Roddy Doyle can’t let Paula Spencer go. She first appeared in the four-part RTE drama Family (1994), played by Ger Ryan, before narrating the 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, a dramatic monologue in which an alcoholic Dubliner looks back on her life following the death of her abusive husband, Charlo (the title refers to an excuse used to explain away a bruise). In Paula Spencer (2006), Paula, newly sober, navigates a changing Ireland. The Women Behind the Door sees Paula, now sixty-six and still haunted by the imagined ghost of Charlo, living through ‘the Covid’. 

Despite the specificity of the setting, The Women Behind the Door is less a state-of-the-nation novel than a psychological portrait of a woman emerging from middle age. Paula admits (to us, at least) that she’s ‘a vain ol’ bitch’, but she is sensitive too. She is interested in words and naming. ‘Divorcee’, for instance, is ‘a great word, as sexy as fuck’. You will be aware that a group of starlings is a ‘murmuration’, but did you know that one of those little wine bottles is a ‘split’? How about the Japanese term ‘wise-man period’? (You can look that one up yourself.)

The plot gets moving fifty pages in, when Paula’s eldest, Nicola, herself a mother of three girls, turns up unannounced at her door. The dialogue is both fast and sharp (‘Serious as cancer,’ says one friend), and the speech is marked by em dashes, which lend the longer conversations pace