The Deportees
By Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 256 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

Jimmy Rabbitte, the hero of Roddy Doyle’s 1986 novel The Commitments, at one point declares the Irish to be “the niggers of Europe”. Rabbitte is trying partly to explain his fascination with black American music, and partly trying to sum up the poverty and dispossession from which the band he forms rescues its various members.