PROPHET SONG BY PAUL LYNCH - BOOK REVIEW

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BOOK NAME: PROPHET SONG

AUTHOR NAME: PAUL LYNCH

GENRE: DYSTOPIAN

PUBLISHER: ONEWORLD

 


Set in dystopian Dublin, Ireland, this book imagines the future of the country under a totalitarian regime where a mother of four is left to fight her tooth and nail to save her family, after her trade unionist husband gets arrested for starting a peaceful protest, after her son joins the rebels to fight the regime, after her second son is destroyed by war and is left in the hospital for surgery, with yet another son who is always strapped to her chest, a daughter who is too innocent for this vicious world and a father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. She needs to choose who she needs to save the most - a choice a mother should never have to make in a free country. Feels claustrophobic and suffocating, right? That’s exactly how this book is written and paced. 


There were moments when I wanted to stop reading and give myself a break, and that’s when I realised how privileged I was to get myself a break, unlike the people who were forced to suffer through them. The beginning was very intriguing and suspenseful, yet it could never prepare my heart for what was to come in the end. 


And about this book being dystopian fiction, I did not even have the slightest idea. What do you mean living under an oppressive regime, losing your family to tyrants and having to become emigrants is futuristic? Though it fits the dystopian category for the geographical location it’s set in, it is also undeniable that this is someone’s history and someone else’s present right now. And that thought is scary enough to unsettle me. 


The slightest problems you’ll face in this book are how the dialogues are missing quotation marks and how there are no paragraph breaks. The entire book reads like a monologue but you’ll get used to it after a certain point and towards the end the same narrative style leaves you as breathless and weary as the protagonists and the tension will seep into you from between the pages. I would say do not skip this one because it’s one of those rare books that has deservedly won a Booker Prize. 


P.s. Revisit the book cover after the last pages of the penultimate and final chapters.


This is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2026 with Piyush’s Plotters.

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