Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by the Irish writer Roddy Doyle, first published in 1993. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it covers roughly one year in the life of a Dublin ten-year-old. The author had already written a series of novels set in the same part of the city.

Patrick Clarke lives in Barrytown, in the north of Dublin, and the book follows his friendships, his school, his teachers, his parents and his younger brother, whom everyone calls Sinbad. Doyle writes it in Paddy's own voice, in short scenes rather than chapters, and the register shifts as the year goes on and the boy's circumstances change.

What changes is the household. The antagonism between Paddy's mother and father becomes harder to overlook, and he spends his time trying to hold the family together and to understand adults who will not explain themselves to him. By the end of the year he is living in a smaller family than the one he started with, taking on responsibilities that nobody has offered him.