I just got sent a vast and hotly tipped new Irish novel set "against the faded grandeur of Dublin's north inner city" which, when I opened it, turned to be written entirely in appalling "Dublin north inner city" dialect.

I am still twitching slightly.

Seriously, dropping an "n" at the end of every "ing" sound does not make your writing sound like the speech of working class Dubliners. Nor does saying "ta" instead of "to" and "ya" instead of "you". It's absolutely appalling, lazy writing, the sort of thing that would only impress someone who's never actually talked to a working class person for more than two minutes in a row. I've said this before, but the ability to write good dialect is incredibly rare, and unless it's done well - Irvine Welsh, Paul Howard - it's noxious and patronising and unreadable. I'll give this book another shot, but every dropped 'n' makes me want to throw it across the room. And there are a lot of dropped 'n's.