Prophet Song
By Paul Lynch
- Genre
- Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
- Publisher
- Oneworld Publications (UK)
- Publication year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 9780861546459
In a near-future Dublin sliding toward totalitarianism, microbiologist Eilish Stack watches her trade-unionist husband detained by a new secret police, then fights to hold her family together as civil order collapses. Paul Lynch's dystopian novel is written in urgent, unbroken prose. It won the...
It begins with a knock at the door: two officers of a newly empowered secret police have come for Eilish Stack's husband, and with that ordinary menace Paul Lynch's Booker-winning novel begins its descent. Set in a Dublin sliding by degrees into authoritarian rule, Prophet Song refuses the distance of speculative fiction, rendering catastrophe through the granular reality of one mother trying to keep her children fed, schooled and safe as the institutions around her fail. Lynch writes in long, unparagraphed sentences that press forward without pause, a formal choice that mimics the suffocating momentum of a society tipping into war and produces a genuinely immersive dread. The book's power lies in its refusal to make tyranny exotic; it could be anywhere, and its refugees, we are reminded, are people exactly like us. Bleak, urgent and formally bold, it is a difficult, necessary novel - speculative in setting but painfully immediate in feeling, and a harrowing, worthy Booker winner.