Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize. On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind?
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.
