A Biggest Book of Fall from The Guardian
“If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song . . . A brilliant, haunting novel.” — Guardian (UK)
“An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to [Eilish’s] fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) . . . Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement. “ — Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Irish writer Lynch (Beyond the Sea, 2020) conveys the creeping horror of a fascist catastrophe in a gorgeous and relentless stream of consciousness illuminating the terrible vulnerability of our loved ones, our daily lives, and social coherence. Eilish muses over the fragility of the body, its rhythms and flows, diseases and defenses. The body politic is just as assailable. A Booker Prize finalist, Lynch's hypnotic and crushing novel tracks the malignant decimation of an open society, a bleak and tragic process we enact and suffer from over and over again.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“A masterclass in empathy, offering a bird’s eye view of the steady crushing of one’s ability to live somewhere safely, the dismantling of ordinary life by tyranny. I hope everyone reads this.” — Suzanne Harrington, The Irish Examiner
“Utterly believable… compassionate, propulsive and timely.” — Financial Times (UK)
“Chillingly plausible.” — Irish Times
“A tremendous achievement.” — Irish Examiner
“Lynch does an excellent job of showing just how swiftly — and plausibly — a society like ours could collapse. Certain sequences read like a thriller — readers will find themselves literally holding their breath — while others are rendered in beautiful, lyrical prose…. A devastating portrait.” — Independent (IE)
“In his typically lyrical, lulling style, Lynch pulls off a masterstroke.” — Big Issue
“A book of encroaching terror… Darkly lyrical, rich… affecting” — Telegraph (UK)
“Timely and unforgettable . . . It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.” — The Booker Prize 2023 judges
“A superb novel . . . one of the best I’ve read in years.” —Deadly Pleasures
“I haven't read a book that has shaken me so intensely in many years... The comparisons are inevitable - Saramago, Orwell, McCarthy - but this novel will stand entirely on its own.” — Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
“Surely one of the most important novels of this decade.” — Ron Rash, author of Serena
“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
★ 2023-10-07
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
