WILLOUGHBY BOOK TALK

PROPHET SONG BY PAUL LYNCH

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023

THURSDAY, JULY 10, 7 PM

Call to register: 203-488-8702

“If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song . . . A brilliant, haunting novel.”—Guardian (UK)

About the book

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?

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.

About the author

Paul Lynch is the Booker Prize-winning author of five internationally acclaimed novels. Widely celebrated for his lyrical style and emotional intensity, Lynch’s novels explore universal themes of the human condition, often drawing comparisons to literary greats such as William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett.

His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Prix des Libraires Best Foreign Novel. It has been described as “a prophetic masterpiece” by The Washington Post and “soul-shattering” by the Booker Prize jury. The novel has also been shortlisted for several major international awards, including the Dublin Literary Award, Italy’s Strega European Prize, and the Kirkus Prize in the United States.

Born in Limerick in 1977 and raised in Co Donegal, Lynch now lives in Dublin. In 2024, he was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Maynooth University where he teaches on the creative writing programme. The same year, he was elected to Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists who have made exceptional contributions to the creative arts. In 2025, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by University of Limerick for his "remarkable contributions to literature". His novels have been translated into over 40 languages.

Reviews

“A prophetic masterpiece.”—Washington Post

“Many, many lines and passages of great beauty and power . . . Lynch is extraordinarily good at the bureaucratic intricacies of the descent into chaos . . . Prophet Song is less interested in ‘Could it happen here?’ than in the follow-up ‘Would you know when to leave?”—New York Times

“A triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave . . . Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings.”—Esi Edugyan, Chair of the Booker Prize 2023 Judges

“Gripping . . . As Eilish’s circumstances deteriorate, Lynch’s dense, lyrical prose barrels down on you relentlessly. As you read, you feel precious time slipping away, the inexorable future rushing toward you. He eschews quotation marks and paragraph breaks, and the result is a chaotic, disorienting whirlwind that amplifies the furious action of the narrative and plants you firmly in Eilish’s weary, fractured mind.”—Boston Globe

“An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to [Eilish’s] fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) . . . Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A disquieting novel from an exceptional writer.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“Irish writer Lynch (Beyond the Sea, 2020) 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 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.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Lynch’s dystopian novel is at once so particularly Irish yet so universally familiar that it deserves the overused modifier ‘Kafkaesque.’”—Los Angeles Times, 10 Books to Read in December

“Gripping and terrifying, [Prophet Song] is set in the very near future, immersing readers in depictions of international conflict set on a familiar stage. This book is recommended for lovers of history, lovers of beautiful writing, and readers who engage with political news daily.” —Forbes, 30 Greatest Dystopian Books Of All Time

“A story mirroring today’s headlines.”—PBS NewsHour

“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

“Thunderously powerful.”—Times Literary Supplement

Source: https://groveatlantic.com/book/prophet-song/

https://www.paullynchwriter.com/