His story about the modern-day ascent of fascism is so contaminated with plausibility that it’s impossible not to feel poisoned by swelling panic ... Eilish is a carefully-drawn portrait of affection and grit ... [A] relentless novel. It’s written in the grammar of dread. The sentences cascade from one to the next without so much as a moment’s breath. And with no paragraph breaks to cling to, every page feels as slippery as the damp walls of a torture chamber. I have not read such a disturbing novel since Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Booker Prize almost 10 years ago.

If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song ... The book is also reminiscent of Anna Burns’s Milkman in that it’s an important story aching to be told, heavy with the reality it bears. While Burns wrote of sexual harassment, Lynch’s dystopian Ireland reflects the reality of war-torn countries, where refugees take to the sea to escape persecution on land. Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries. This is a story of bloodshed and heartache that strikes at the core of the inhumanity of western politicians’ responses to the refugee crisis ... Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.

...thunderously powerful ... The stage seems set for a fine political thriller, with one brave woman forced to find the strength to fight back, secure her husband’s release and uncover the dark secret at the heart of the new regime. But Lynch is playing a very different game. As he chips away at the certainties of Eilish’s life, so he strips away the comforting conventions of narrative suspense; as he frustrates her need for clarity and closure, so too he rejects our desire for exposition and dramatic balance ... Lynch reins in his remarkable descriptive skill and instead lets procedural and circumstantial detail suggest familiar real-world horrors. Syria and Ukraine are obvious reference points, but, given the modern Irish context, the most potent echoes are of the civil conflict north of the border half a century ago, and for readers who lived through it, the house searches and roadblocks, the persecution of dissent, and the idealistic resort to armed resistance will feel more like a warning from recent history than a bravura display of dystopian imagination ... In Prophet Song Paul Lynch asks us to face some of our darkest fears, and if he offers no comfort, and little hope, then we must surely recognize his true purpose: that the furious reader should return to the real world determined to find a better ending for this story.

Lynch stays deliberately vague, partly so that the story can serve as a more general allegory, but there’s a cost to the allegory, too. Without an emergency, without any kind of immediate history, it’s hard to understand what the nationalists are fighting for ... This is not a funny book; it’s fairly relentless, even before things go haywire. I wouldn’t have minded a little more acceptable, less intense life ... Lynch’s decision to leave the political context blank starts to pay off. What’s happening to Eilish opens out into a much larger and older story of displacement, as she struggles to find a passage with whatever family she has left into something like civilization.

Part of the power of Lynch’s novel, especially its ability to compel the reader forward, lies in its structure ... The novel’s sense of claustrophobia and dread left me afraid to turn off the light ... This is not a book that presents political oppression as an intellectual problem to be anticipated or solved. It aims for the limbic system, and it does not miss.

Harrowing ... I found the novel not so much propulsive as compulsive, carried forward by an uncontrollable force ... At times, the novel's relentless bleakness made it almost unbearable to read.

Gripping ... Lynch’s dense, lyrical prose barrels down on you relentlessly ... Harrowing ... hat’s a story that needs to be told, and a story we would be well served by. Because the West’s struggle to show empathy for these immigrants and refugees is not due to some alienating attribute they possess that can be solved by a simple substitution; it’s a bigger problem that lies deep within us.

...if I had to judge Prophet Song on conveying this political message, I would say it had succeeded. But I have to judge it on its value as a novel, and this is where things get trickier. Printed on the back of the book is a glowing blurb by the author Samantha Harvey. Reading Prophet Song, she says, 'you remember why fiction matters.' So why does fiction matter? Should it influence hearts and minds, provoke political change? Or should it do more? Should it, as Nabokov famously said, provide 'aesthetic bliss,' invoking a little shiver of pleasure in our spines? ... There are plenty of great political novels, but they start off with the story, not the message. This is where Lynch falls down, often displaying motives and exposition crudely through dialogue ... There are moments of beauty in Prophet Song ... And there are some brilliantly fast-paced scenes too ... But these remain rare glimpses of Lynch’s talent, of what the novel could have been. It’s a pity that it becomes an exercise in totalitarianism-by-numbers.

Lynch’s language is darkly lyrical, rich and somewhat stylised – there are no quotation marks for speech, for example – and he can, on occasion, shade into a slightly souped-up stream-of-consciousness ... His chief device is to make strange this familiar place: 'This sense now she is living in another country.' He does this while turning the whole into something universal, and totemic – 'feeling herself the carrier of some ancient burden.' The downside of a narrative founded on the feeling of being 'a passenger to her own life' is the removal of one of the chief engines of character, that of free will, or the ability to act. Lynch can, at times and forgivably, reach for what sometimes sounds like journalistic editorializing...For all that, this is powerfully sustained. Prophet Song is not a subtle book, despite its slowly paced accretions, but it’s no less affecting for that.

...the is one of the most harrowing, minatory and provocative novels I have read in a while. It has the sharp cut of reality despite being set in an alternate version of our world, except for when it is all too recognisable. The final and penultimate chapters are truly shuddersome ... The Irish context is important – I thought of it more as a kind of metaphysical novel. At what point do you flee? How do humans cope when faced with the unbearable, the inconceivable? Is the idea of common humanity an ethical fiction? So many books today do not take such questions seriously and reduce real politics to party politics ... Structurally Prophet Song does some very clever things. Although it is a linear narrative, some of its threads are left dangling. I can imagine that some readers might be piqued that we never find out what happens to some characters, but that is the very point. In so many conflict zones, individuals and families do not get closure, and to try to tie a bow on it, even in the form of an afterword, would have been a mistake. Nor does it veer into the sentimental polemical – 'this is what we have to do!' – as if that ever achieved anything.

If you have read non-fiction about life under totalitarianism, such as Anna Funder’s Stasiland or Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories of the Soviet Union, you will be familiar with these kinds of details. Consequently, the fictional world that Lynch builds in Prophet Song, while not lacking authenticity, feels more the product of research than imagination ... Prophet Song is, at least, melodious thanks to Lynch’s long sentences – he knows when to soar and when to get to the point. However, his pages are pocked with jarring word choices ... Lynch’s lyricism has earned comparisons to The Road author Cormac McCarthy but the Irish writer’s work lacks the weight and bottomless blackness of the late American’s ... It’s a shame because the story of Eilish and her family, who become embroiled in the battle between the government and the burgeoning resistance as their country descends into civil war, is absorbing. There are strong meditations on what home means in a world in perpetual crisis and how we disassociate ourselves from other people’s catastrophes ... over all this is an odd novel, a half-successful fusion of the dystopian and poetic, carrying a prophecy that sounds familiar.

Lynch presents it all with matter-of-fact poetry that makes the events credible and serves as a chilling reminder that no country is immune. Prophet Song is a disquieting novel from an exceptional writer.

Irish writer Lynch conveys the creeping horror of a fascist catastrophe in a gorgeous and relentless stream of consciousness illuminating the terrible vulnerability of our loved ones, our daily lives, and social coherence. Eilish muses over the fragility of the body, its rhythms and flows, diseases and defenses. The body politic is just as assailable. A Booker Prize finalist, Lynch's hypnotic and crushing novel tracks the malignant decimation of an open society, a bleak and tragic process we enact and suffer from over and over again.”

An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017). Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.