Author(s): Paul Lynch

Novel | Ireland | 2023 Booker long list | 2023 Booker short list | Read our reviews!

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 the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband, Larry, a trade unionist for the Teachers' Union of Ireland. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together. Exhilarating, terrifying, propulsive and confrontational, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality and devastating insight, a novel that can be read as a parable of the present, the future and the past.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
Prophet Song is furious in tempo and content. It has knocked me sideways and taken all the other contenders off my best book of the year (and it’s been a year of very good fiction) list by strides. From the knock on the door to the final moment, this novel is breathless, heart-wrenching and brutal. So human, so foreign, yet so real. Eilish is a mother, a wife, a daughter, someone’s sister. She is a microbiologist/desk bound researcher, harrying her children into the car to get to school on time, coaxing her husband, school teacher/union delegate for an answer to a question when he is miles away in his own thoughts, and wondering what her teenage son sees in that girl. She could be your neighbour. Set in an alternative Ireland, nationalism is on the rise. Larry is warned to call off the strike. People are wearing party pins on their lapels. The police are knocking on the door. And then…Larry is arrested. Lawyers can’t make contact with their clients. People are leaving the country. Flags are flying from homes in the street and if you don’t have one, you're against them. You’re a traitor. And then…the rebellion begins and you are at war. Your father’s mind is slipping, your eldest son needs to leave the country, your husband has disappeared, your daughter won’t eat and your baby is teething, while your 12 year-old has become an enigma. And then… food is scarce, bombs are falling, sometimes the electricity comes back on and you bake bread and do the washing on the fast cycle. Prophet Song is an urgent critique on brutality and power; and what it takes to remain in the world even when you are disorientated and disconnected from everything you know and that which holds you safe. The language is bundled together, the sentences almost stepping on each other, as claustrophobic as the situation Eilish finds herself in. This is a brilliant novel that needs to be read for its beauty of language and structure, as well as its haunting content.
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'Monumental... You remember why fiction matters. It's hard to recall a more powerful novel in recent years.'-- Samantha Harvey, author of The Western Wind
'The work of a master novelist, Prophet Song is a stunning, midnight vision whose themes are at once ancient and all too timely: fear, complicity, resistance, and what becomes of us when hell rises to our homeland.'-- Rob Doyle, author of Threshold
'It was gripping and chilling, and terribly prescient - a novel with a darkly important message about this particular moment in time.'-- Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither
'Part cautionary-tale; part dystopian-nightmare; part fever dream. Whichever way you skin it, there is no denying the gathering power of Paul Lynch's writing. This is at once fearless and affecting prose with a ticking clock inevitability and a clanging bell pay-off. Both urgent jolt and slow furnace, Prophet Song takes you to the edge of the chasm and insists that you look down. A masterclass in terror and dread.'-- Alan McMonagle, author of Ithaca
'Paul Lynch is a writer of great vision and power and Prophet Song is his best novel yet.'-- Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
'Dublin's
Paul Lynch has been a lynchpin of the Republic's internationally celebrated output for over 10 years, his profound investigations of place, identity, religion, and memory consistently compared to names as awesome as Dostoevsky, Heaney, Nabokov and Emily Dickinson. In his typically lyrical, lulling style, Lynch pulls off a masterstroke here, setting his futuristic story, of a nation made fearful and suspicious by their tyrannical government's surveillance, in the most familiar of settings, his home country. The chill, so close to home, is blood curdling.'-- The Big Issue
'A profoundly human story that brings to life the horror of living in a modern war zone. Deft, subtle and written in strikingly beautiful prose, with this stunning novel Paul Lynch has joined the ranks of Atwood, Orwell and Burgess.'-- Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of The Narrow Land
'A mesmerising, shattering novel, Prophet Song lives and breathes on the page and lingers long after finishing it. A paen to maternal love amidst gathering forces of darkness, Paul Lynch has done something extraordinary here. I felt as though I were experiencing the disassembling and terrifying restructuring of Eilish's world and am forever altered having entered it. The dream-like sensibility of the prose offsets the startling brutality of Eilish's plight. It is a work of wonder.'-- Lisa Harding, author of Bright Burning Things

Author Biography: Paul Lynch is the prize-winning author of the novels, Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. His third novel Grace won the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award. His second novel The Black Snow won France's bookseller prize, Prix Libr'a Nous for Best Foreign Novel. He has been shortlisted for many international prizes, including France's Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature, Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Prize), Prix Litterature Monde and the Walter Scott Prize. He was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Donegal and lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.