YOUNG ADULT FICTION: A Greyhound of a Girl, By Roddy Doyle, Marion Lloyd Books, 176pp. £10.99

IN A Greyhound of a Girl, a novel for young adults, Roddy Doyle chooses poetic fantasy over the "giggler treatment" of his earlier children's books and the gritty sociological realism of his first novels. Twelve-year-old Mary and her mother, Scarlett, collect Mary's elderly grandmother, Emer, from hospital, where she is clinging to life. Accompanied by the ghost of Mary's great-grandmother, Tansie (Emer's mother), they set out on a night journey from Dublin to a farm near Wexford. "Four generations of women . . . heading off on a journey in a car. One of them dead, one of them dying, one of them driving, one of them just beginning."

The farmstead is where grandmother Emer and her brother, James the Baby, were raised by their own grandmother after influenza snatched Tansie when Emer was only three. Tansie’s ghost “lingered” to ensure that her children, especially Emer, were “grand” and getting on with their lives.

In a series of flashbacks to the Wexford of Ireland's Ownand the one-bar electric fire, the lives of the women are fleshed out. Their uninhibited pronouncements and actions suggest their clear-eyed toughness, sharply contrasting with the vulnerability of abused, downtrodden women such as Paula in Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors(1996). Mary's granny openly broaches the topic of her imminent death, admitting that she fears she'll never open her eyes again when she shuts them. (Taboo subjects find their way into several of Doyle's children's stories. His 2008 picture book, Her Mother's Face, addresses the topic of death, while Brilliant, his story celebrating Dublin's designation as a Unesco City of Literature last year, is about banishing depression.)

In A Greyhound of a Girl, Doyle, who is associated with debunking the literary pieties of rural culture, links traditional and urban identities, developing the intergenerational support that was a subsidiary theme of the Barrytown books. In The Snapper(1990), for example, the pregnant Sharon and her father, Jimmy, discover that they can support each other. Barrytown is where Roddy Doyle's first novel, The Commitments(1987), is set, and is the place to which he returns in The Van(1991) and in his Booker-winner and possibly his best book, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha(1993).

If his latest story has a moral, it is that the redemption of Ireland depends on gender-bonding between forthright, intelligent women who assimilate their past rather than forget it.

A Greyhound of a Girlis also, however, a poignant cautionary tale about male vulnerability. It celebrates four generations of strong women, but its men fail to realise their potential. They remain peripheral, almost exotic. Worst is Emer's brother, James the Baby, so-called even in late adulthood. Also deprived of a mother, he never marries. Tansie dismisses his loss: as a baby he didn't miss his mother as much as Emer did, she surmises. Mary's changeling adolescent brothers are as inarticulate as the men of Doyle's short-story collection, Bullfighting (2011), talking about iPads with their much-loved grandmother because they cannot cope with her dying.

A northside Dublin vernacular and what Euan Ferguson called "filthy black humour" were Doyle's hallmarks when he fictionalised working-class violence, alcoholism and brutality tempered by inventiveness, comedy and resilience. A Greyhound of a Girldispenses with the Barrytown social satire, one-liners and negativity but retains local idiom and humour. Doyle's Wexford colloquialisms are as deft as his Dublinese. "Sure wasn't I a ringer for my own mother, God be good to her," Tansie declares.

The humour is neither "filthy black" nor of the frivolous variety of his daft, scatological, irreverent but clever The Giggler Treatment(2000) and Rover Saves Christmas (2001), which children find hysterically funny.

Doyle's uncomplicated plots, cinematic dialogue and light touch when analysing his characters' internal lives underwhelm some literary critics. However, his approach can be remarkably effective, as in the stories of Bullfighting(2011) and in his young-adult book Wilderness (2007). The latter's low-key exchanges between a newly found birth mother and her daughter are quietly masterly.

Bullfighting conjures up domesticated "manopausal" dudes confronting their mortality. They wouldn't dream of articulating their existential angst, but Doyle's clear prose and uncluttered storylines highlight it. Similarly, in A Greyhound of a Girl, the unadorned style underlines how a 12-year-old confronts the inevitability of death without fear. We learn little about her great-grandmother's life beyond the grave, because Tansie's purpose in the story is to serve the living.

Doyle, a champion of women, a great respecter of children’s intelligence and a staunch supporter of literacy programmes, affirms in this powerful tale that, sisters, there is a sisterhood.

Young Irelands: Studies in Children's Literature, a collection of essays edited by Mary Shine Thompson, will be published by Four Courts Press next month