2023 Booker Shortlist: Paul Lynch for Prophet Song
Friday 6th October 2023
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, Somerset BA1 1NG
7pm
7.30pm
Paul Lynch is the award-winning author of the novels Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. He has won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and France's Prix Libr'a Nous for Best Foreign Novel, and is now nominated for the Booker 2023 shortlist.
He joins us for the novel that has awarded him the Booker nomination: a fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice.
'I haven't read a book that has shaken me so intensely in many years... The comparisons are inevitable - Saramago, Orwell, McCarthy - but this novel will stand entirely on its own.' Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
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.