About the Book:
The Booker Prize 2023 Winner
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, 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.
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.
Published by Oneworld
Released August 2023
My Thoughts:
This was heavy. Winner of the Booker Prize for 2023, and entirely deserving of all the accolades, it’s brilliant, yet so claustrophobic and grim, reading it was like being locked in an elevator with no air and no hope of rescue.
Paul Lynch writes in a manner I’ve come to identify as very Irish: sparse and to the point; conveying so much with the bare minimum of words and punctuation. Prophet Song not only has no punctuation for dialogue, but there are no paragraphs either. This of course added to the urgency, the claustrophobic feeling, the sheer desperation of the story as it coursed along and progressively got grimmer and grimmer.
Prophet Song is one of those novels that frighten you with its potential. So many nations around the globe have experienced the sort of totalitarianism depicted within this novel, yet for those of us who live in ‘safe’ nations, we don’t think that we are at risk. By setting this story in the Republic of Ireland, Paul Lynch demonstrates how easily we can slide from safe to risk, from freedom to restriction, from life to death.
Prophet Song was my book club read for January. We were all in accord that it was brilliant and thought provoking, but also traumatic and heavy. Perhaps that mix is what makes a novel worthy of such accolades.
Theresa Smith Writes 
Great review, not sure if I could handle no paragraphs though. I can barely handle no dialogue punctuation, and only then in the right hands (e.g. Tim Winton’s in Cloudstreet).
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I read a lot of Irish fiction so I’m almost used to it now. It does ask more of the reader though, and not everyone can be bothered with that. It’s also not as simple as just leaving them out. The writer has to write differently and I’ve seen some hatchet jobs.
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I agree with your review and will nominate for a group but think a lot won’t be keen. I loved the bee sting which was more the people’s winner in the uk and Ireland
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Oh, I should read that then. It’s caught my eye a few times now.
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Nope, not for me, grim dystopias are too depressing.
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As a mother with sons who are of ‘fighting’ age as depicted within the novel, it was hard going as the novel is told from the perspective of a mother. I won’t be watching any adaptations of it if it’s ever done.
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I can relate to that.
My Ex was a ‘nasho’ and — as the mother of a son — all my voting life I never voted for any of the politicians who voted for conscription.
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