Prophet Song
A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 • INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize
Shortlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award
One of The Irish Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
"A prophetic masterpiece." — Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind?
The winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed national bestseller, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An Irish family is shattered by the rise of a radical right-wing party in this slow-burning dystopian novel from Lynch (Grace). In the near future, Ireland is governed by the National Alliance Party, an eerily totalitarian mutation of nationalist politics dating back to the Troubles. Their leaders employ a militant secret police force, which rounds up trade unionist Larry Stack after he participates in a protest march. Larry's four children assume he's been killed along with others "disappeared" by the NAP, but his wife, Eilish, is in denial and refuses to consider leaving for somewhere safer. Lynch renders Eilish's inner world with relentless blocks of page-long paragraphs, unbroken even during conversations with her father, Simon, who, in his dementia, often blurs past and present (he describes NAP "thugs" as "trouble," suggesting they are reminiscent of IRA soldiers). Some of this might be lost on readers unfamiliar with the history. Still, the momentum of the prose lends an air of portentousness to the narrative until Eilish's denial finally crumbles as she claims the body of one of her sons, who has been tortured to death, from a military hospital. Readers well-versed in the context will find Lynch's vision painfully plausible.
