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Award-winning author Roddy Doyle returns
with the sequel to his acclaimed national bestseller A Star
Called Henry
Henry Smart is on the run. Fleeing from his Republican paymasters,
the men for whom he committed murder and mayhem, he has left
behind his wife, Miss O’Shea, in a Dublin jail, and
his infant daughter. When he lands in America, it's 1924,
and New York is the center of the universe. Henry, ever resourceful,
a pearl gray fedora parked on his head, has a sandwich board
and a hidden stash of hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower
East Side. When he starts hiring kids to carry boards for
him, he catches the attention of the mobsters who run the
district. It is time to leave, for another, newer America.
In Chicago there is no past waiting to jump on Henry. Music
is everywhere, in the streets, in nightclubs, on phonograph
records: furious, wild, happy music played by a man with
a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. But Armstrong
is a prisoner of his color, and the mob is in Chicago too:
they own every stage—and they own the man up on the
stage. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he
chooses is Henry Smart.
In Oh, Play That Thing, Roddy Doyle once again gives us
a prodigious, energetic, sexy novel, rich with language and
music and, as Henry makes his way across America, teeming
with surprises. It is both a saga unto itself—full
of epic adventures, breathless escapes, and star-crossed
love—and a magnificent follow-up to A Star Called
Henry.
Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous
novels, three of which--The Commitments, The
Snapper, and
The Van--were made into movies. The Van was nominated for
the Booker Prize in 1991. Two years later Paddy Clarke
Ha Ha Ha (Penguin) won the Booker Prize and was a New
York Times bestseller. His most recent novel, The
Woman Who Walked Into Doors (Penguin) was a national bestseller. Also a screenwriter,
Roddy Doyle lives in Dublin.
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