The Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water.
Lynch has form when it comes to dark subjects, having previously written about violence and revenge in fledgling America (Red Sky in Morning, his debut), a deadly blaze at a rural farm (The Black Snow), the Irish famine (Grace) and men adrift on the Pacific (Beyond the Sea). Even so, Prophet Song is likely to go down as his most frightening book.
