Ireland Drained of Religion

In the U.K. and Ireland, no literary award is greeted with as much fanfare and public interest as the Booker Prize. The latest recipient, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, is a novel set in an Ireland of the imagined near future under a far-right government. Eilish, a mother and scientist, is trying to locate her husband, an arrested trade unionist, and to protect her children and elderly father. It is a book that elicits a mixed response: admiration, on the one hand, for Lynch’s achievement in taking us into the darkest, most disturbing corners of life under a dictatorship (and for his rather deft treatment of Ireland drained of religion); and, on the other, bemusement at his non-account of how this dictatorship came to be. 

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