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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