There are books that entertain us, books that educate us, and then there are books that violate our sense of safety—books that reach through the page and remind us how fragile the membrane is between civilization and chaos. Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, belongs firmly in this last category. It is not a comfortable read. It is not meant to be.

Set in a shadow version of contemporary Dublin, Prophet Song follows Eilish Stack, a microbiologist and mother of four, as her ordinary life disintegrates with horrifying speed. The catalyst is deceptively simple: two men from the newly formed Garda National Services Bureau—essentially secret police—appear at her door one evening looking for her husband Larry, a senior official in the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Within days, Larry vanishes into the implacable silence of the state, swallowed whole along with hundreds of other ordinary, blameless citizens. What follows is a masterclass in how democracies die—not with a bang, but with a series of incremental surrenders that seem almost reasonable until suddenly they’re not.

Lynch’s genius lies in his pacing and world-building. Unlike typical dystopian fiction that drops readers into an already-ruined landscape, Prophet Song begins in a world virtually identical to our own. There are undertones of political instability—a government act granting emergency powers, whispers of crisis—but nothing seems catastrophically wrong. The genius of this approach is its realism. As one character observes: “if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true—this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.”

This is what makes Prophet Song so profoundly unsettling. With each page, the vultures circle closer. The progression from normalcy to nightmare feels entirely natural, inevitable even. Lynch depicts the manner in which civil society breaks apart lingeringly and brutally—not only the obscenities enacted by the state but those willingly enacted by one citizen against another. By the novel’s end, suburban Dublin is scarred by airstrikes, divided by makeshift roadblocks into rebel-held and regime-controlled areas, lacking basic services. Yet no stage in this descent feels unlikely, exaggerated, or difficult to believe. After all, we have watched it unfold from the comfort of our sofas in former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Ukraine.

The novel’s structure and style demand reader commitment. Lynch writes in the stream-of-consciousness tradition, employing Cormac McCarthy-influenced syntax with heightened, sometimes biblical language. There are no paragraph breaks—text runs on for pages, uninterrupted. Dialogue lacks quotation marks; speakers aren’t given new lines. This unconventional approach, an homage to Joyce’s Ulysses common among Irish writers, initially acts as a barrier. Many readers will likely abandon the book in its early pages, finding it too much work. But those who persist discover that these stylistic choices serve the narrative brilliantly, enhancing the claustrophobia and dread, making us feel Eilish’s powerlessness in the face of constant, unstoppable evil.

At the heart of this nightmare is Eilish herself, and Lynch’s depiction of her is both nuanced and devastatingly sympathetic. The fiercely embodied quality of her love for her children is entirely successful, making her impossible decisions agonizing to witness. We watch her lie to her children over and over about what’s happening, knowing we would probably do the same. We watch her vacillate about how best to keep them safe, screaming internally for her to run while understanding her paralysis. As her sister Áine says from the safety of Canada: “History is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”

But when do you leave? This question haunts the novel. Eilish embodies the impossible position of the ordinary person caught in extraordinary circumstances. She’s caring for four children, a father with dementia, desperately searching for her vanished husband, trying to maintain some semblance of normality. Her steadfastness—her refusal to abandon her home, her country, her search for Larry—is both her defining strength and her potential doom. Later, she reflects on this paralysis: “History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”

Lynch understands that the stubborn continuation of domestic minutiae—the sulks, the bickering, the unexpected tenderness, the constant running out of milk, the defrosting of portions of bolognese—both fortifies and traps Eilish. There are echoes here of the COVID-19 pandemic, that bizarre spectacle of a world consumed by terrifying crisis while still needing clean socks to be found. “One moment you are pruning trees and the next you are an improvised ambulance driver,” Lynch writes, capturing how quickly the normal can become unrecognizable.

The novel’s ending has drawn criticism for feeling rushed after nearly 300 pages of slow burn. When Eilish finally decides to flee, the plot accelerates to breakneck speed. Some readers wish Lynch had spent more time with Eilish as a refugee, exploring how she grows and changes in her new circumstances. Yet perhaps this narrative choice itself reflects the disorientation and incompleteness of displacement—how suddenly one world ends and another, uncertain one begins.

Prophet Song is bleak and brutal, but it is also beautiful, powerful, and terrifyingly important. Lynch’s language achieves genuine lyricism even in depicting horror: “the dust laying itself down upon the years of their lives, the years of their lives slowly turning to dust.” As one character observes late in the novel: “the end of the world is always a local event.” This is Prophet Song‘s devastating truth—that catastrophe is always happening somewhere, to someone, and the distance between “there” and “here” is far thinner than we imagine.

This is essential reading for our precarious political moment. Not enjoyable reading, but essential nonetheless. As the book itself warns us: “if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts.” In an era when democratic norms are tested globally, Prophet Song serves as both warning and witness. It deserves to be read, discussed, and—uncomfortably—remembered.

by Maria A Perdomo