Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Atlantic Monthly Press (2023), 320 pages
Description
"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 toward 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? Exhilarating, terrifying, and surprisingly intimate, Prophet Song offers a shocking vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together"--… (more)
Original publication date
2023
Media reviews
With his winding, dread-filled sentences and without paragraph breaks, Lynch plunges readers into this nightmare and scarcely provides any space to breathe....At times, the novel's relentless bleakness made it almost unbearable to read. And yet its plausibility kept me from looking away....The
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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. Show Less
Lynch stays deliberately vague, partly so that the story can serve as a more general allegory, but there’s a cost to the allegory, too. Without an emergency, without any kind of immediate history, it’s hard to understand what the nationalists are fighting for ... This is not a funny book;
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it’s fairly relentless, even before things go haywire. I wouldn’t have minded a little more acceptable, less intense life ... Lynch’s decision to leave the political context blank starts to pay off. What’s happening to Eilish opens out into a much larger and older story of displacement, as she struggles to find a passage with whatever family she has left into something like civilization. Show Less
His story about the modern-day ascent of fascism is so contaminated with plausibility that it’s impossible not to feel poisoned by swelling panic ... Eilish is a carefully-drawn portrait of affection and grit ... [A] relentless novel. It’s written in the grammar of dread. The sentences cascade
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from one to the next without so much as a moment’s breath. And with no paragraph breaks to cling to, every page feels as slippery as the damp walls of a torture chamber. I have not read such a disturbing novel since Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which won the Booker Prize almost 10 years ago. Show Less
Booklist
Irish writer Lynch conveys the creeping horror of a fascist catastrophe in a gorgeous and relentless stream of consciousness illuminating the terrible vulnerability of our loved ones, our daily lives, and social coherence. Eilish muses over the fragility of the body, its rhythms and flows, diseases
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and defenses. The body politic is just as assailable. A Booker Prize finalist, Lynch's hypnotic and crushing novel tracks the malignant decimation of an open society, a bleak and tragic process we enact and suffer from over and over again. Show Less
I don’t know when I last read a book that left me as shaken and disturbed as Paul Lynch’s fifth novel. It is a tremendous achievement, telling a dark story of a society’s descent into war that resonates far beyond Ireland....This is one of the most important novels of 2023....Paul Lynch is a
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fearless writer — unafraid of taking on large themes and tackling them face to face. The story recounts a mother’s experience of life in suburban Dublin, as it is transformed by a tyrannical government into a war zone. While it is Irish in detail, its events recall those seen nightly on the news....Prophet Song is an extraordinary achievement, totally realistic, demonstrating the power of fiction to enhance our empathy for those elsewhere, living through horrors beyond our everyday experience., witnessed only on the TV screen. Show Less
With Ireland under tyranny, rebels must decide between family and liberty in this brilliant, Booker-longlisted story for our times... Free will and the meaning of liberty are pushed beyond their limits, eroding both to a state of near non-existence. It begins in Dublin as Larry, a senior trade
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unionist, is disappeared at a rally, leaving his wife, Eilish, to raise their four children....Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere. Show Less