Prophet Song

 'Paul Lynch is peerless' Donal Ryan, author of Strange FlowersAn Irish Times 'Book to Look Forward to in 2023'A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning authorOn 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, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

'A monumental novel, prose so flawless and flowing that reading it is akin to being taken up in a wave. You emerge dazed. You remember why fiction matters. It's hard to recall a more powerful novel in recent years.', '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.', 'It was gripping and chilling, and terribly prescient - a novel with a darkly important message about this particular moment in time.'  , '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.'

Paul Lynch is the prize-winning author of the novels, Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. His third novel Grace won the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award. His second novel The Black Snow won France’s bookseller prize, Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel. He has been shortlisted for many international prizes, including France’s Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature, Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize), Prix Littérature Monde and the Walter Scott Prize. He was born in Limerick in 1977, grew up in Donegal and lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

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