Paperbacks: The Deportees, by Roddy Doyle

The New Ireland may be a different place from the one in which Jimmy Rabbitte launched The Commitments and Paula Spencer walked into doors, but Doyle retains his iconoclastic humour in this collection of stories.

In 800-word chapters first published in Metro Eireann, a small Nigerian boy faces the battlefield of an Irish classroom, a beloved daughter brings a black man home for tea and Jimmy Rabbitte even gets a happy ending.