The Snapper

The Snapper is a 1990 novel by the Irish writer Roddy Doyle and the second book of his Barrytown Trilogy, following The Commitments. It is set in the working-class Dublin suburb of Barrytown and tells the story of Sharon Rabbitte, who is twenty and unmarried when she becomes pregnant.

Sharon refuses to say who the father is, and the novel follows the pregnancy from the announcement to the birth, largely through the reactions of the people around her. Her father Jimmy Rabbitte is embarrassed and then defensive, her friends trade theories, the neighbours form opinions, and the comedy comes from the gap between the size of the scandal in Barrytown and its ordinariness everywhere else.

Doyle writes the novel almost entirely in dialogue, setting down the characters' speech and pronunciation as they would say it, which is what gives the trilogy its distinctive sound. It was followed by The Van, and its form, a book with almost no narration at all, is the reason it is often used to teach the writing of dialogue.