Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

About the book:

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

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.

About the author:

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.

Publisher: Oneworld
Publication: 23 August 2023
Format: Paperback, 320p
ISBN: 9780861546862
Category: Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Dystopian and utopian fiction