PRAISE FOR THRESHOLD
Ecce homo! Threshold is audacious, daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny and – to hurtle to the other end of the alphabet – wonderful. Above all, it’s a highly original attempt to engage, formally, with Nietzsche’s dangerous question: "How much truth can one mind bear?" - Geoff Dyer
Game and gleefully provocative. Threshold, a nettlesome new novel, has been my treasured companion of late. - New York Times
If this blurb were a movie title it would go like this: Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humour on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe. - Rachel Kushner
Not many books manage to expand your mind, do your head in and set you laughing out loud. This one does. And Doyle’s words sing on the page. - Spectator
Riddling, irreverent, fearless… His best book so far. - Times Literary Supplement
A book of experience in some quite old-fashioned, powerful sense. - Guardian
The funniest novel I’ve read since January… An absolute blast. - Daily Mail
Narrated with an appealing blend of wide-eyed curiosity and no-bullshit scepticism. - Observer
The great drug novel of our time… His book is generous and honest as few contemporary fictions are these days. - Ryan Chapman
Doyle, quite rightly, won’t be pinned down on the verisimilitude of this hedonistic odyssey involving a young buck called Rob. What matters is the charged, streamlined prose that sucks you into its current. One of the most strangely thrilling reads of the year so far. - Sunday Independent
This is the type of brilliant, maverick achievement that sets a writer apart. Wonderfully readable and with a skein of black comedy running through it that serves to highlight the seriousness of Doyle's intent. A Pilgrim's Progress for our time. - Mike McCormack
I was buzzing after reading Threshold: it's the kind of work you have to come down from - playful, potent, lurid, moving and fearless. - Lisa McInerney
Threshold is Rob Doyle's best book yet, a thrilling mutation somewhere between novel, essay collection, report, travelogue and confession. Doyle is a Romantic wandering in the post-sublime, a zealot without a cause, and his is a journey you don't want to miss. - Chris Power
An extremely funny book, a novel that sends itself up mercilessly even as it is created. His best work to date. - Kevin Barry
Extraordinary, quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt. Masterful. - John Boyne
Confirms his status as one of the most original and intelligent writers at work today. - Donal Ryan
PRAISE FOR THIS IS THE RITUAL AND HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN
Doyle plumbs the bleaker aspects of literary life with startling precision and candor. – New York Times
Doyle's willingness to push the envelope of art into the dark depths of experimentation ensures no subjects are off limits… It would, of course, be easy to berate Doyle as an author who is going for the cheap shot here, using the shock factor to gain notoriety. But to make such value judgements would be to completely misunderstand the length, breadth, depth and brilliance of his artistic vision. This is the Ritual is a masterstroke in experimental short fiction brimming with ideas, vulgarity and intelligence. And Ireland has just gained a cult author of exceptional talent. - Sunday Independent
These bleak, brilliant stories also maintain the cloacal tradition of Swift and Joyce. But don't be put off by the literary allusions. These compelling vignettes stand up for themselves even if you're ignorant of the more arcane influences. They transport us beyond the routines and petty distractions of our daily round… An unsettling collection - cries from a psychic wasteland, fragments shored against ruin. - Sunday Times
Doyle’s cocky passion proves irresistible. He writes with the confidence of a literary giant. Doyle is as good as everyone — from John Boyne to Colm Tóibín — says he is. - Daily Mail
Relentless nihilism... With This Is The Ritual, Doyle has confirmed his status as one of the finest of the new generation of Irish writers. - Hot Press
A world-class writer... Doyle constructs bold, clever, gleeful narrative puzzles that invite the reader in and create space for a new kind of bravura vulnerability. Human? All too human. – Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo
This Is the Ritual bears out this lightness, this playfulness, without brightening its darker corners. These are stories of a sick world, of a near-unconscionable, unintelligible world, but they’re also easy to fall into. There’s enough gallows humour to make even the strangest, most discomfiting situations worth rereading a couple of times. Doyle might be staring into the void, but he’s finding something worth laughing at in there. - Ian Maleney, Irish Times
Doyle displays a ludic sensibility… The stories are gleefully nihilistic… He has a gift for evoking the base and unpleasant aspects of life in vivid and visceral detail... It creates an almost hypnotic effect; a miasmic fictional space into which the reader slips. – Times Literary Supplement
Doyle’s fiction deals with life’s major themes: sex, death, guilt, shame, the meaning of existence. A collection so palpably saturated in the fervour of brooding iconoclasm… Doyle’s storytelling is compelling and engaging, suffused with wit, honesty and emotional intelligence. - Irish Times
A collection of hilarious, sharp-tongued page-turners ... A bright, poetic, erudite new voice. I loved this. – Big Issue
I'm tempted to quote Nietzsche back at Rob Doyle: he's not a writer – he is dynamite! Except – like Nietzsche – he's a tremendous writer too. And I have a suspicion that the author of this provocative and thrilling collection is going to get even better. – Geoff Dyer
Sets up a metafictional diving board and leaps from it with misanthropic glee… Magnetically effective. - Guardian
A tremendous talent. Every page fizzes with vitality. – Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone
The mutinous fragments of Rob Doyle's fictions are bilious, provocative and unnervingly compelling. – Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins
God may be dead, but a new literary star is born. – Sunday Times
A series of fragmented pieces hovering between fiction and non-fiction. – Guardian
For sheer bravery and for style, for its integrity of vision and for its uncompromising tone. – Colm Toibin, Irish Times Book of the Year
The language is unflinching, the story uncompromising… A powerful and provocative novel and easily the most honest account of young Irish people for many years. – Guardian
A powerful, passionate and electrifying novel. Many writers try to recreate the traumas and anxieties of teenage years in fiction but very few manage it with as much conviction as Rob Doyle. – John Boyne
A lament for the blank generation ... a powerful debut, maybe the first novel since Kevin Power's Bad Day in Blackrock to interrogate the dark side of the young Irish male's psyche. – Irish Times