Tom Mooney's Reviews > Prophet Song

The most powerful, moving and urgent novel of 2023, Prophet Song is a novel I will never, ever forget, and would be a deserving winner of The Booker Prize.

Ireland is in the grip of a government that has lurched to the right, cracking down on protest and breaking trade unions. When Eilish's husband, a trade unionist, is disappeared, it starts a chain reaction that slowly and cruelly chips away first her rights, the her freedoms, and later everything else. All the while, Eilish tries to keep her four children safe, and plot some kind of future for her fractured family.

Lynch's masterpiece begins as a Kafkaesque nightmare that soon spirals to ever more desperate depths.

On the one hand, this is a dystopian tale worthy of comparison with Saramago's Blindness, McCarthy's The Road and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But, by the end, it becomes a novel that should awake those in these isles and beyond to the fact that the only difference between you and those people you see on the news, those suffering in brutal situations in far-flung places, is luck.