Prophet Song

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, Larry, 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. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe. 

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times. 

Review

'Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness... This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.' Esi Edugyan, Chair of Judges, The Booker Prize 2023

'If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it's Paul Lynch's Prophet Song... A brilliantly haunting novel.' Observer

'With...Prophet Song, the judges have chosen perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist... it’s also the very intimate, elemental story of one woman’s love for her family, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of rising chaos.' Guardian

'Prophet Song is composed of masterful sentences, and packs a profound emotional punch.’ Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation

'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

'Powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real... Lynch's depiction of Eilish is nuanced and sympathetic, and in the fiercely embodied quality of her love for her children, entirely successful.' Guardian

About the Author

Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, Grace and Beyond the Sea. Grace won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018 and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 2018. The Black Snow won France's Prix Libr'à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children. His website is www.paullynchwriter.com