Prophet Song
A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)
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4.2 • 284 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this Booker Prize–winning dystopian drama, a mother faces impossible choices in an increasingly totalitarian society. When the secret police come for her union-leader husband, Eilish Stack begins to realize that the world she has known is falling apart. As a scientist and mother of four, Eilish has a hard time understanding how the democratic nation of Ireland could so quickly devolve into a police state, but as others in her orbit start to disappear and the government clamps down, she learns to adapt in order to save what remains of her family. Author Paul Lynch makes the horrific feel chillingly believable, using darkly poetic language to describe a divided Dublin where civil liberties are being shredded every day. Stunning, realistic, and heartrending, Prophet Song is a thrilling and important read about the rise of contemporary fascism.
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.
Customer Reviews
Bleak, but so real.
Awful,stunning, a portent of things to come in America.
So relevant for events today
Excellent! And a terrifying portrait of what could come if we as society don’t come to our senses. Authoritarianism is alive and well and even thriving across the globe. This is a dangerous moment for the human race.
Prize worthy
Chilling and gripping, and already happening in so many places. Interesting writing style that grows in you and fits the events.