Not a light, easy to read or entertaining novel but a powerful one: it kept me enthralled even I found it disturbing at times as it seems to describe a possible future not so far from reality.
Great storytelling and style of writing, a book that made me think but also made me feel afraid.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is a remarkable novel. Readers can feel the impending menace from the very first pages and that feeling never lets up. Paul Lynch has written a powerful novel about things that once seemed impossible to imagine, but now feels all too plausible.

“History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is the record of the people who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”

A slow start but this picked up big, and the themes are terrifyingly relevant to today. A powerful portrait of a mother trying to hold her family together, while a violent conflict between a right-wing government and a resistance force threatens to swallow them whole. READ THIS.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the ARC of this novel.

This novel, by Paul Lynch, is a stunning piece of fiction. Lynch manages to capture a claustrophobic, menacing sense of anxiety throughout the book that did not relent.

A timely and meaningful commentary on the slippery slope of authoritarian governments and how citizens are caught in the crossfire of political games. “The end of the world is local” hit a particularly strong note with me.

Not a joy to read, but one that will stay with me for a long time.

I have had this book on my TBR for a few months even before it won The Booker Prize in 2023. This is a powerful book that had me gripped to each page. The conclusion leaves you with a haunting sense of proximity to real-world events experienced by many and that are close to the surface in many countries.💔

Prophet Song depicts a nation’s transformation, a change in government leading to the erosion of rights and freedoms. Eilish Slack battles to keep her family intact after her husband, protesting the new regime, vanishes overnight. As her older son joins the resistance, she faces the dilemma of choosing to stay in her homeland or seek refuge with the rest of her family.💔

Your heart is torn as you read this story. The choices, the desperation and sadness. The story’s believability is unsettling, reflecting the harsh reality in some countries right now. People having to make impossible choices. I couldn’t put this book down. The storytelling and the writing were excellent. The absence of quotation marks and paragraph breaks, rather than hindering the story, intensifies the sense of desperation. Highly recommend this one. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have no means to go there …”

Thank you to @groveatlantic for a copy of this book.
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#bookrecommendations #prophetsong #paullynch

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Thank you so much for sending me this book. I asked for this on a whim and was SO EXCITED when I realised it was up for the Booker Prize and then went on to win it, and for good reason.

Lynch's writing is beautiful. It's so engrossing and yet you also want to find your way out. I think this book would be best read in physical copy due to his writing style which includes large blocks of text with very few full stops as reading this on my phone really lost some of the magic it held I think. I definitely can't wait to pick up the physical version of this for a re-read as I think it will be a much better reading experience for this poetic and powerful writing.

The book was incredibly moving.

Very rarely does a novel enrapture your emotions entirely and relentlessly. 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.

Each time I picked up this book, I felt Eilish's transformation of hope to that of diminishing resolve, so much so that I found myself needing to lift my head from the book and breathe to calm my nerves. Early on in the novel, an enigmatic darkness permeates Eilish's life, holding her within its clutch, and the recurrent entrance of this darkness rings like a siren song of the canaries of the coal mines for the reader. Lynch’s profound lyrical prose so honestly, painfully and beautifully holds you in their grasp, making for a profoundly engaging and thought-provoking reading experience.

Prophet Song echoes the violence in Palestine, Ukraine and Syria, and the experience of all those who flee from war-torn countries. This is a story of bloodshed and heartache that strikes at the core of the inhumanity of Western politicians' responses to the refugee crisis.

Winner of the Booker Prize 2023

Set in an alternative present (or maybe near-future) where after the right-wing National Alliance party seizes control of the government, Ireland is descending into totalitarianism. Eilish, a scientist and a mother of four, has to take care of her children.

I really tried (and hopefully succeeded in) erasing my friend’s rates from my mind before reading. This was my second try reading this novel. I struggled to read it, and the long chunks of text with no paragraph breaks certainly didn’t help (and I'm aware this was done intentionally to create the atmosphere).

The original idea was interesting, but it didn’t work for me. The novel didn’t grab me and somehow didn’t sound authentic and probable, at least in this way. And many details were never explained, or maybe I didn't catch them. Also, I couldn’t get to like Eilish. She is supposed to be a likable character, and you should feel compassion for her. There’s much heartache in this story, and in its essence, it is not a bad one. But I couldn’t get past some of her statements and actions. Yes, I will mention this, too. Like her disbelief that someone could listen to your phone call is one of them. Really? I was wondering if she was really that naive or just plain dumb.

But I can see also what others liked. I would say that the horror of something like this happening in the Western world, now, to us, and not in some faraway country, is among the powerful reasons. Similar stories happened before and are happening right now, so why would this story be any different or more horrific?

I can't decide about the rating. 2.5, maybe 3 stars.

I just finished reading last night, and WOW, what a gut punch Prophet Song turned out to be. I understand that this book takes place against a speculative Irish backdrop, but when compared to the current occupation of Palestine, many of the moments within this story felt all too real. Ultimately, this felt like a story about a single mother caught at the brink and striving to keep her family whole during increasingly desperate times, but there were so many lines I underlined that could be applied to any variety of experiences.

My one complaint (or observation?) about the book is in regard to its pacing. The text was incredibly dense and the sentences lengthy, to say the least. On the one hand, this gave it a sense of unstoppable, spiraling doom, which feels appropriate given the context; on the other hand, it made it really hard to keep track of time, location, speaker, and internal vs external thoughts.

This book feels well-matched for fans of What Strange Paradise (Omar El Akkad), Against the Loveless World (Susan Abulhawa), or Exit West (Mohsin Hamid). Thank you to Grove Atlantic for the opportunity to read and review!

I'm not always bothered by the lack of paragraphs or punctuation, but I found it made my reading experience more difficult in this case.

The first half of this book felt very slow, with a build-up of the tension and circumstances of the protagonist, but I found that I just never wanted to pick it back up to see what happened next. Things escalate in the final 25% but for me it was too little, too late. There are some great moments of writing, but ultimately wasn't a book for me.

2023 winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction
4★
“Let me understand you correctly, he says, you’re asking me to prove that my behaviour is not seditious? Yes, that is correct, Mr Stack. But how can I prove what I am doing is not seditious when I’m merely just doing my job as a trade unionist, exercising my right under the constitution? That is up to you, Mr Stack, unless we decide this warrants further investigation, in which case it will no longer be up to you and we will decide.”

Dystopian Dublin, which is not Belfast and The Troubles, this is worse, it’s insidious, it’s relentless, it’s all too believable, and Lynch just keeps pouring out event after event, thought after thought, sometimes in beautiful, inspired language that I didn’t want to interrupt, but sometimes with far-too-clever phrases that I thought perhaps he had collected and saved for use in a novel.

“She drives to the supermarket and coins free a trolley
. . .
a boy standing in the driveway of a house across the street watches the evacuation while rounding an orange in his hand.”

The long convoluted sentences, some pages long with no quotation marks or paragraph breaks demand constant, close attention. Turning other parts of speech into verbs, while descriptive, tends to interrupt the flow and pace of what is an intense, exhausting story.

The nature of his writing leaves the reader gasping for breath. The section I quoted is a small part of the scene where Larry Stack, the father of the family and a supporter of those protesting against the government, is answering to two visiting Garda, from the Garda National Services Bureau. He’s being told, basically, that he can’t win, and it’s not long before he is arrested.

"How quickly posters have appeared on the advertising boards along the bus routes, pages handwritten or typed up on a computer with the photos of men and women who have disappeared, the people arrested, detained by the regime, one moment you are asleep in your bed and wake to see the GNSB standing in your room, they ask you to put on some clothes, help you find your shoes."

After Larry is picked up, Eilish is left with four children. Their eldest is Mark, who is only a couple of weeks shy of his seventeenth birthday and has already been notified that he must register, but he is determined to leave home and join the rebels.

Fifteen-year-old Molly hangs a white ribbon from the tree in their yard every week that her father is gone. Twelve-year-old Bailey is a lively boy, who begins acting up as Eilish is becoming more stressed and highly strung and protective. Bossy, pushy, becoming frantic.

Oon top of that, baby Ben is teething. One day, Molly announces:

“I’m going out, she says. Out where? I’m going into town. Eilish regards her for a moment, the white denim jacket, the white scarf coiled around her neck. If you’re going into town, she says, you can take them off right now. Molly looks down at her body with mock surprise. Take what off right now? You know what I’m talking about. How do I know what you’re talking about, how do I know what anybody is talking about or even thinking of for that matter if nobody says anything, if nothing is ever said in this house?”

Eilish’s sister and family live safely in Canada, while her father lives in another part of the city alone with his dog and his increasingly failing memory. Checkpoints sprout on street corners, men with firearms patrol, curfews are put in place, shortages make shopping difficult, and Eilish’s sister keeps pressuring her to leave. But the government won’t issue baby Ben a passport.

As I was reading this in December 2023, the news has been filled with the obliteration of Gaza, which made the strikes and attacks in this even more frightening. But it isn’t about me or how I felt.

“… it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time,…
. . .
and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore. . . ”

Lynch began writing this four years ago, and he thought it might end his career. I can see why he feared that and also why it didn’t, and I can also see why the Booker committee selected it. On the other hand, I can also understand why many readers have left it unfinished or given it a very low rating. To say it's divisive is an understatement.

None of the characters got under my skin or stirred me, but the way they represent everything that is so outrageously wrong with justice in the world today, certainly affected me - the fracturing of the family unit, the division between friends.

This may be dystopian fiction about Dublin, but it’s just the way the world has been working for a long time for so many people in African and South American countries, Eastern Europe, and throughout Asia.

As Lynch says, their news “comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news...” Don't ignore the news.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a copy of #ProphetSong for review.

4.5 rounded up!

An absolutely eerie, gorgeous, and gut-wrenching story of a fictional civil war in Ireland — this book made me a little sick to my stomach, but in a good way.

It covers a spiral from civil unrest to abject violence and chaos in their country, fueling an outflow of refugees — all through the lens of one woman trying to keep her family whole in the midst of the catastrophe. It forces its characters through every step of disbelief and indecision and denial: wondering how this could happen in their homeland, and how it can be allowed to continue; deciding whether to put their heads down and endure, or fight back and stand up for themselves and what they believe in; and choosing whether to ride out the storm and hope it’s short-lived, or flee while they still can in case things get worse.

The style and structure is a little stream-of-consciousness (no quotation marks and no paragraph breaks, if that’s a deal breaker for you), and I felt like the writing really fueled the feeling of “the fog of war” Eilish feels as she faces impossible choice after impossible choice. It was completely engrossing and ripped my heart right out. Definitely recommend, but brace yourselves!

dnf @30%

objectively, I’m sure this is a great story (it didn’t win the booker for nothing) but I don’t believe this is quite for me. I may try to return to it in the future, but my brain is having trouble with the writing style/formatting - single paragraphs lasting multiple pages with no dialogue breaks was doing my head in

Dystopia, disturbing and tense, this novel is set in Dublin after a fascist, totalitarian government gains power. It tells the riveting story of one family and their life under the regime. Eilish, a scientist and mother of four tries to hold her family together after her husband, Larry, a trade unionist is arrested, her son, Mark, a high school student, joins the rebels as a civil war rages.

Blew me away. It's one thing if an author creates a "simmering" plot - one where the reader knows something is going to happen and we are waiting and waiting for the hammer to fall - with plot. Paul Lynch structurally adds to the momentum and tension of the "simmering" pot structuring the pages without breaks. Dialogue is within a page without breaks. There aren't paragraphs. It's like reading on a train speeding down the tracks as the conductor walks away. The subject is often mundane - grocery shopping and storing a bicycle after a day out - but this is mixed with the simmering of a community slowly becoming trapped. Magnificent. Go read this. Read it with a book club or buddy because you'll want to/need to discuss.

Holy Moly! I can see why this one won the Booker prize. A steady march into a bleak hopelessness. I loved it!

First published in the UK in 2023; published by Grove Atlantic on December 22, 2023

Prophet Song is a dystopian tale of an authoritarian Irish government that makes drastic changes in the lives of Dubliners after a far-right political party is voted into office. Irish citizens naively believe they still have rights, but rights are useless when an unchecked government disregards them.

Larry Stack is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers Union of Ireland. The garda accuse him of acting against the interests of the state by (in Stack’s view) engaging in peaceful industrial action to better the working conditions of teachers. Workers who organize and demand better wages are branded as communists by the far right political party that controls the government. The Garda treat a peaceful march for workers’ rights as a riot. The Garda begin to snatch up union leaders pursuant to newly enacted emergency powers. They place Larry in detention. They arrest journalists. They impose curfews. As time goes on, the government takes control of the media and cuts off access to foreign news.

Larry and his wife Eilish have four kids. Eilish must do her best to hold the family together until Larry returns. But will he return? She wants her oldest son Mark to leave the country so he will not be conscripted into national service, but the government won’t renew the family’s passports. Her plan to smuggle Mark into Northern Ireland is foiled when he refuses to run away from the fight against tyranny.

After Mark disappears, Eilish’s daughter tells her they should all leave the country, but Eilish’s father is developing dementia and she doesn’t know who will take care of him. A sister who lives in Canada tells her that “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”

When an insurrection takes root, the reader sees it from Eilish’s limited perspective. It is a topic of conversation among people standing in line at the grocer, the subject of newspaper articles she skims. Her attention is focused on more personal issues. She loses her job when her son is branded a traitor. Her younger son blames her for his father’s disappearance. The butcher refuses to serve her because Mark’s name has been published in a list of traitors.

The focus on Eilish gives the novel its power. As the novel moves forward, Eilish finds herself in the middle of a civil war that she can’t wrap her head around. She doesn’t want to abandon her life. She can’t grasp the reality that she can never have that life back. Her house is literally in the middle of a war zone; a newly constructed checkpoint prevents her from traveling on her street. Bombs are falling; mortars are exploding; her roof is collapsing. When rebels seize the street, their curfew and restrictions are just as bad as the government’s, leaving Eilish to tell a curfew enforcer that her son didn’t fight to replace a government with “more of the same.”

The last stages of the story move with the pace of a thriller as Eilish undertakes a journey to freedom. The novel invites the reader to ask what freedom means and what price is worth paying for it. Like other refugees, Eilish regards freedom as an abstract concept that is secondary to the struggle to keep her children alive. While Eilish once believed in free will, she now understands that she has lost the ability to make meaningful choices. Her options are dictated by men with guns.

I don’t think I’ve read another novel that brought home quite so forcefully the experience of civilians who struggle to live in a war zone. Eilish’s constant fear, her desperate attempts to keep her children safe, her self-recriminations for not bringing them out of the country (even at the risk of leaving her husband and father behind) while there was still an opportunity for safe travel, all invite sympathy and understanding, not just for Eilish but for anyone whose life has been disrupted by war.

Scenes that might be familiar — a parent whose mind is slipping away, a child who hurls vile insults at a parent in response to stressful moments — are devoid of the melodrama that a lesser writer might invoke. Paul Lynch strips the scenes to their essence, underplaying the drama to achieve a greater sense of realism.

Prophet Song isn’t overly difficult to read, although long blocks of text without paragraph breaks might be unappealing to some readers. (Read the Amazon reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s novels and you’ll learn that some readers don’t know how to use bookmarks when a writer refuses to make reading easy for them.) The story is so engaging that empathic readers — even those with limited attention spans — should be able to stick with it. Those who do will be rewarded, just as Lynch was rewarded with a well-deserved Booker Prize.

RECOMMENDED

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is a dark descent into a very possible future. Set in Ireland, Lynch chronicles a worsening situation of a country that descends quickly into fascism and then deteriorates into civil war. At the centre of it all is a family tenuously held together as the troubles deepen.
Prophet Song opens in an Orwellian place. A new government has taken over and it is starting to flex its police state muscles in response to unspecified threats. When the security services come knocking on her door, Eilish can sense that something is wrong but refuses to believe how wrong. When her unionist husband Larry disappears at a protest, she still clings to the idea that normality will resume. But then her eldest son is called up and flees to the resistance and her remaining three children are put in danger. And the situation only gets worse from there.
Prophet Song is written in long sentences and paragraphs, a style that is intended to deliberately overwhelm the reader, to both pull them into Eilish’s world but also create a literary repression. There is a weight to the text, a pressure from page one that is impossible to escape. But this style also overwhelms much of the lyricism of Lynch’s writing. There are passages that soar but they feel buried beneath the blocks of text in which they are interred.
Prophet Song won the 2023 Booker Prize as much, probably, for its timeliness and themes as for its undoubted literary merit. It takes what has become a reality for many in the Middle East, in Central America, in Africa and makes it everyone’s issue. That is, if it can happen in Ireland it can happen anywhere. The UK is currently debating what to do with refugees. The question Prophet Song asks those readers those countries being sought by refugees to consider is what would you do if those refugees are coming from next door. And it is an important question to ask.
Prophet Song asks readers in their comfortable Western homes to consider what their lives would be like if their world went the way of so many others. Through the story of Eilish and her family Lynch is asking for empathy for a much wider group of people, all those who have been displaced by political turmoil. So that while Prophet Song can be a hard read, it is also an important one

Since the Booker long list was announced, this was one of the three books that I really wanted to read.

As soon as I got into the pace and style of the book, I didn't want to put it down. I had to because it's distressing and hard to read, but I thought it was excellent and it felt really close.

Thank you @groveatlantic for giving me access on @netgalley, and congratulations to Paul Lynch for winning the #bookerprize2023.

#prophetsong #paullynch

Winner of the Booker Prize 2023, Prophet Song is a novel about a family in Ireland trying to function normally as a hardline government introduces strict regulations to counter civil unrest. As the country slips towards civil war, the family does what it can to survive.
The style of writing is a little confusing at first but it doesn’t distract from a fine story.