“The stories in DIG offer assured, evocative, loving renditions of the gritty, everyday world of work and family, but are so deftly and delicately written they seem to float.”
“In DIG, a man carries to work an expired safety helmet, and in his head he has one desire unknown even to himself: to break from fear and be loved, and to give love. Terry Doyle’s stories are full of this surface industry and the precarious inner workings of decent people trying to be good in a society worn bare of protection.” – Michael Winter
“Reading Terry Doyle’s stories, I felt I had alighted on an island where familiar objects could be repurposed to new and extraordinary uses. Here is the hardware of everyday life, rendered luminous and infused with meaning. Each story is a perfect, self-contained world. Yet, as you step from one story into the next, you discover small, satisfying overlaps. Somehow, in your pocket, is an object you have carried with you from a previous story. The effect if of a beautifully coherent whole. What a gift, what a discovery, this collection is.”
“DIG introduces a cast of scavengers and survivors who get their hands dirty, literally and otherwise… each character’s fears, motives and assumptions are gently wrenched from their chests when they aren’t looking. Terry Doyle’s subtle, perceptive, precisely attentive stories will leave you reeling.”
– Goodreads

“A very real and empathetic sense of the struggle of ongoing daily lives, not so much pivotal turning points but vignettes of the day-to-day, the celebrations, losses and loans, arguments, injuries, siblings and families – every strand that makes up the fabric of lives going quietly, deeply wrong. Doyle writes with enviable clean prose that cuts close to the bone.”
– The Minerva Reader

“Terry Doyle brings a true East Coast Canada feel and understanding to his work. What may seem simplistic in his work actually makes the reader think and double-think about what his stories tell us. He is obviously a humble writer and humble man, a quality that rarely shines through in the works of many authors. Simple is not easy writing. Simple is difficult. Doyle is able to hold the attention of the reader as he tells you a story, giving you the feeling you are sitting across from him at his kitchen table. He is a writer who works within a true art form and is one to be admired.”