Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle returns to his character of Paula Spencer in The Women Behind the Door

At the end of Roddy Doyle’s domestic violence novel The Woman Who Walked In (1996), Paula Spencer finally makes a stand after decades of physical abuse by bashing in her husband Charlo’s head with a frying pan when she sees him looking “that way” at their daughter, Nicola.

“My finest hour,” she said. She couldn’t fight Charlo on her own behalf, but she discovered she could fight him on behalf of her child.

And now, 25 years have passed, COVID-19 and lockdown have gripped Ireland, Charlo is long dead and Paula is well. In “The Women Behind the Door,” the third book in Doyle’s Paula Spencer trilogy (the middle novel is simply titled “Paula Spencer”), she is in her 60s and hasn’t had a drink in years.

She went from cleaning offices at night to working at a dry cleaner’s during the day. Her four children are all grown and gone, and she has a friend named Mary and an occasional boyfriend named Joe who laughs at her jokes.

She is especially proud of Nicola, her eldest daughter, a “goddess,” a person who has achieved success. “At her worst, Paula can look at Nicola and think, ‘It wasn’t all a disaster.’”

It’s a hint that disaster is coming, and it does. The day Paula returns home from a joyous outing with Mary, Nicola shows up at her door, catatonic. She’s left her husband and children behind. She returns home.

What happened? That’s a question that takes up the entire novel to answer, and the journey is full of suffering tempered by wisdom and humor.

“The Women Behind the Doors” is a haunting novel—Charlo’s voice echoes in Paula’s head, even though she’s been dead for decades. Alcohol is never far from her mind, even though she no longer drinks. The past flows through her brain: memories of beatings and drinking binges, crying children, money spent on vodka instead of food. And guilt. Oh, guilt. Shame.