On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland?s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. 


Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.


How far will she go to save her family? And what ? or who ? is she willing to leave behind?


Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother?s fight to hold her family together.

Paul Lynch is the award-winning author of five novels - Prophet Song, Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. His most recent novel, Prophet Song, won the 2023 Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the Strega European Award and the An Post Irish Novel of the Year.  

He has previously won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and France's Prix Libr'à Nous for Best Foreign Novel, among other prizes. He has been shortlisted for many international awards, including the UK's Walter Scott Prize, and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Prix Littérature-Monde, and the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. 

In 2024, he was appointed Distinguished Writing Fellow at Maynooth University and was elected to Aosdána, which honours artists who have made outstanding contributions to the creative arts in Ireland. He lives in Dublin.