Recommendations from our site
“The Booker Prize is the biggest fiction award in the UK and Ireland. Paul Lynch won the £50,000 prize in 2023 for Prophet Song, a darkly prophetic novel set in a near-future Ireland that the New York Times described as ‘an unsettling dystopian parable.’ In it, a biologist and mother of four must cope alone after the secret police take her husband into custody and the country descends into civil war. It’s earned comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, but Lynch has downplayed the ideological elements of the book” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“A darkly foreboding novel set in a dystopian, semi-familiar Ireland. Lynch has explained that the novel grew out of his anxieties in the post-Trump, ‘post-truth’ era: ‘I wondered about how the real is no longer real, how misinformation and disinformation have led to a decline in trust in traditional sources of authority.'” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2023: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
