'Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness... This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave.'
Esi Edugyan, Chair of Judges, The Booker Prize 2023'If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it's Paul Lynch's Prophet Song... A brilliantly haunting novel.' Observer
'With...Prophet Song, the judges have chosen perhaps the most timely and urgent book on the shortlist... it's also the very intimate, elemental story of one woman's love for her family, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the immediate world around her in the face of rising chaos.' Guardian
'Prophet Song is composed of masterful sentences, and packs a profound emotional punch.' Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation
'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
'Powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real... Lynch's depiction of Eilish is nuanced and sympathetic, and in the fiercely embodied quality of her love for her children, entirely successful.' Guardian
'Surely one of the most important novels of this decade.' Ron Rash, author of Serena
'A compassionate, propulsive and timely novel that forces the reader to imagine - what if this was me?' FT
'The fifth novel from one of the most acclaimed Irish writers of his generation... As an adventure story-cum-political warning, it's being touted as Ireland's 1984.' Telegraph
'In his typically lyrical, lulling style, Lynch pulls off a masterstroke... The chill, so close to home, is blood curdling.' Big Issue
'Chillingly plausible.' Irish Times
'Thunderously powerful... In Prophet Song Paul Lynch asks us to face some of our darkest fears, and if he offers no comfort, and little hope, then we must surely recognize his true purpose: that the furious reader should return to the real world determined to find a better ending for this story.' TLS
'One of the most harrowing, minatory and provocative novels I have read in a while. It has the sharp cut of reality despite being set in an alternate version of our world, except for when it is all too recognisable. The final and penultimate chapters are truly shuddersome.' Scotsman
'Eilish is a wonderful creation... Lynch does an excellent job of showing just how swiftly - and plausibly - a society like ours could collapse. Certain sequences read like a thriller - readers will find themselves literally holding their breath - while others are rendered in beautiful, lyrical prose.' Irish Independent
'The work of a master novelist, Prophet Song is a stunning, midnight vision whose themes are at once ancient and all too timely: fear, complicity, resistance, and what becomes of us when hell rises to our homeland.' Rob Doyle, author of Threshold
'A profoundly human story that brings to life the horror of living in a modern war zone. Deft, subtle and written in strikingly beautiful prose, with this stunning novel Paul Lynch has joined the ranks of Atwood, Orwell and Burgess.' Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of The Narrow Land
'While much of the book's sinister p