“Through its young heroine, we experience all the describable and indescribable horrors of the Irish famine. Lynch goes where only famished dogs should go, and it’s a measure of his skill that he keeps us with him all the same … We care about Grace and her companion, her young brother Colly, but what grips is the merging, through grief and desperation, of the dead and the living. When you’re starving, Lynch seems to be asking, are you truly alive? Without resorting to make-believe, he carefully and inexorably explores the confusion. Grace is a story of ghosts but it isn’t a ghost story. Grace is a story of the Great Famine, but it’s not narrowly political. Grace is a tale of misery, but it’s not a misery memoir. Lynch is a sure-footed tightrope walker … Lynch’s lush, poetic prose deliberately and painfully acts as a foil to the reality of the famine … Amid the lushness are direct stabs to remind us that Grace isn’t just a story set long ago. When, with sobering insight, Lynch writes that ‘though you can learn to ignore hunger … hunger is always thinking of you,’ he’s the voice of today’s famished millions.”
–Katherine Grand, The New York Times, September 1, 2017
