About the Book:
The Booker Prize 2023 Winner
The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
Published by Oneworld
Released August 2023
My Thoughts:
This was heavy. Winner of the Booker Prize for 2023, and entirely deserving of all the accolades, it's brilliant, yet so claustrophobic and grim, reading it was like being locked in an elevator with no air and no hope of rescue.
Paul Lynch writes in a manner I've come to identify as very Irish: sparse and to the point; conveying so much with the bare minimum of words and punctuation. Prophet Song not only has no punctuation for dialogue, but there are no paragraphs either. This of course added to the urgency, the claustrophobic feeling, the sheer desperation of the story as it coursed along and progressively got grimmer and grimmer.
Prophet Song is one of those novels that frighten you with its potential. So many nations around the globe have experienced the sort of totalitarianism depicted within this novel, yet for those of us who live in 'safe' nations, we don't think that we are at risk. By setting this story in the Republic of Ireland, Paul Lynch demonstrates how easily we can slide from safe to risk, from freedom to restriction, from life to death.
Prophet Song was my book club read for January. We were all in accord that it was brilliant and thought provoking, but also traumatic and heavy. Perhaps that mix is what makes a novel worthy of such accolades.
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