Her casual attitude to the business of haunting brilliantly embodies the book's theme – that what lives on is not ectoplasm, but family.

Opinionated, easy-going, profoundly unspooky, Tansey is the best ghost since Christmas Past. But A Greyhound of a Girl is different, and the difference is Tansey. Book lists are groaning with the cries of the dying and the undead. Children's literature is going through a bit of a deathsploitation phase at the moment. This is also a story about death and how to prepare for it. In one very funny scene, Mary's brothers do see Tansey's ghost, and leave the room – scared not because she's a ghost, but because there are too many women in a confined space. The men are far in the background, busy at their PlayStations. It's a story about four generations of women and what they have to say to each other. Mary's mother, Scarlet, has to help her daughter pass on that message. Mary's grandmother Emer is ill, about to die, and Tansey has a message for her. Mary O'Hara, the heroine of Roddy Doyle's beautiful new novel, doesn't ask about the past: it comes up and taps her on the shoulder in the shape of the ghost of her great-grandmother, Tansey. What tale did I have to tell? Decimalisation. My parents could at least regale me with tales of the Blitz, the evacuation, war hero fathers returning from the sea. It's a bitter moment, all the more bitter if you belong to my generation.

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Roddy doyle the barrytown trilogy