$26.00
$26.00
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 - INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
New York Times Editors’ Choice - A Biggest Book of Fall from The Guardian
An NPR, Guardian, Globe & Mail, and Tertulia Best Book of the Year Selection
An Amazon Top 10 Book of December
The winner of the Booker Prize 2023, 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.
“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
"Harrowing . . . The lesson for readers is not necessarily to wake up to signs of totalitarianism knocking at our doors, but to empathize with those for whom it has already called.” - NPR
“Stunning in every sense of the word . . . In masterfully controlled and powerful prose, [Lynch] yanks the reader headlong into the experience of living in a country that is taken over by an authoritarian government — slowly, slowly, and then suddenly and completely . . . Prophet Song is a brilliant, disturbing reality check. Lynch insists that we understand ‘the end of the world is always a local event.'” - Tampa Bay Times
“Prophet Song is . . . a horror story, with the new political order serving as the monster now inside the house . . . This is not a book that presents political oppression as an intellectual problem to be anticipated or solved. It aims for the limbic system, and it does not miss.” - Los Angeles Times
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?
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.