PROPHET SONG (2023)

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. 

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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 societal collapse and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

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UK, Ireland & Commonwealth: published by Oneworld, September 2019 

North America: published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, March 2020

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PRAISE FOR BEYOND THE SEA

Winner, Prix Gens de Mers 2022

• Book of the Year, Martina Devlin — The Irish Independent 2019

• Book of the Year, Sebastian Barry — The Irish Independent 2019

• Book of the Year, Peter Cunningham — The Irish Independent 2019

"Paul Lynch’s harrowing and dystopian Prophet Song vividly renders a mother’s determination to protect her family as Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism. Readers will find it timely and unforgettable. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.“

— Booker Prize Jury

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"If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song...a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere."

— Observer

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"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…  Where Prophet Song leads us in its closing pages is shocking, yet grimly inevitable. We would do well not to look away."

— Guardian

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"A prophetic masterpiece"

— The Washington Post

"A gripping, brilliantly realised story of political violence [inviting] comparisons with the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell… The local can be anywhere; other people’s nightmares can be yours. This is a masterly novel that reminds us that democracy is always fragile, and that it is fragile now."

— Literary Review

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"Thunderously powerful… beautifully measured and solemn prose... 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."

— Times Literary Supplement

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"This horrifying yet lovely novel would be a masterpiece even in a time of halcyon equality and justice for all. But that time is not this time."

— NPR

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"Lynch's writing bristles with tension... It's greatest achievement is that at no point do the events depicted feel too improbable to be realistic… In a time when so many novels feel like carbon copies of books we've read before, Prophet Song is entirely original."

— Sunday Independent

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“[Lynch’s] novels are artistic creations… and Beyond the Sea is based on an extraordinary true story…. Lynch’s concern is not only the minutiae of survival or men battling the elements, although his account of these is exciting and persuasive. His main interest lies in the existential struggle within: how men handle themselves in extremis…  His fourth novel has echoes of Melville, Dostoyevsky and William Golding… But the literary work it most invokes is Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with its theme of crime and punishment.”

— The Sunday Times

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“Exquisite, meticulous, powerful... A fisherman and a youth adrift on the Pacific in a fishing boat. Nothing and everything happens, often at the same time. And what a stylist"

— David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

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“With the only sea as a backdrop, Lynch has the gift of transforming the story of this shipwreck into a breathless existential quest. A powerful epic in the beyond.”

— Ariane Singer, Le Monde 

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“Lynch’s characters often come from highly specific cultural and historical milieus – they may be postwar Irish emigrants, nineteenth-century tenant farmers, members of rural communities affected by the Great Famine – but his narration wrenches them from their immediate social context and deposits them in a distant, metaphysical terrain: a space outside their cultural moorings, where they appear perpetually uprooted or displaced. Here, Lynch’s heroes become the locus of complex meditations on memory and identity. Yet the author tends to balance his philosophical speculation with a descriptive strain: one that foregrounds the physical detail of landscapes, settings and bodies.

In Beyond the Sea Lynch heightens and refines these trademark features… [and it] articulates Lynch’s literary preoccupations with striking clarity: the universal questions of whether we can forget the past, whether we engender our own fate, and how much of our soul is expressed in our physical being. Once Bolivar and Hector are cast into the sea – helpless, static and isolated – there is nothing left for the narrator except these existential problems, which he unpacks with a careful, piercing intelligence…

Almost every line, pared down to its essential components, seems cut short by an omission, haunted by something unsaid. Large gaps between the paragraphs entrench this sense of pervasive silence…. its pages are alive with elegance and insight.”

— Oliver Eagleton, The Times Literary Supplement

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“An epic with, as epics should have, more than a touch of poetry about it, and possibly the grimmest, but also most beautifully written, novel set at sea that I have read since William Golding’s Pincher Martin”

— Andrew Stuttaford, The New Criterion

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“Lynch takes a panga boat lost at sea and fashions it into a story that seems to inhale and exhale with the very days and nights experienced on Earth … [this is] the best type of reading experience—one where nearly everything propels thinking. It grips the reader with large and unanswerable questions: What is true? What is knowing? What is meaning? Yet, somehow, Lynch provides exactly what seems to be impossible—answers.”

— Keith Contorno, The Chicago Review of Books

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““Horrifying yet incredible… An antidote for trauma suffered during Covid-19 lockdown? Imagine weeks turn to months adrift in a small boat, watching ships in the distance, and their slow vanishing… So, what is the hook that pulls the reader along? Aside from the obvious hope of ship or land, it is the fisherman’s journey to self-enlightenment that is the real page-turner. In exploring survival and existential crisis we witness men being confronted by their own truths.”

— Carina McNally, Irish Examiner

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“Paul Lynch is rightly considered one of Ireland’s rising literary stars…Beyond The Sea acts as parable: about hope vs despair and man vs nature (with subtle climate change warnings running throughout). It’s also a heart-rending story about relationships and redemption.”

— Hot Press

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… haunting … The initial quick pacing gives way to languid, sparse chapters in which the men explore their relationships, values, and spirituality … Lynch’s enchanting tale reveals the stark beauties that come from struggling to live at the mercy of the natural world.”

— Publishers Weekly

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“A lucid, lyrical tale… Lynch’s spare and precise novel has a detached, almost mythical quality.”

— The Irish Times

“Paul Lynch won the Irish Novel of the Year 2018 for Grace, a lushly lyrical adventure story set in Famine-era Ireland. His follow-up…[is] a short but absorbing tale of the lengths to which people go to avoid admitting who they really are.”

— Metro

“Paul Lynch is one of our greatest writers, and Beyond the Sea is his best work yet. A sublime, elemental, fever dream of a novel that constantly tests us, tempts us, and guides us. This is a work of art that relentlessly and slyly captures not only the trials of the human spirit, but what we are doing to our environment, our world, and to each other–a profound, unforgettable journey, one I urge you to experience.”

— Paul Yoon, author of The Mountain

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“Combining the sensibilities of a Joseph Conrad or a Cormac McCarthy with the poetic intensity of an Emily Dickinson, this rich, raw, and powerful seascape by Paul Lynch throws the sea’s storms and the sea’s light into the darkest corners of human consciousness. An astonishing achievement.”

— Jane Urquhart, author of The Night Stages

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“A powerful, heart-breaking story of friendship forged in the most extreme conditions. With its echoes of Greek myth, it yields up those small moments of grace that are deeply transformative.”

— Mary Costello, author of The River Capture

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“Beyond the Sea sets us adrift in the unbounded ocean and stuns us with beautiful, fierce insights. After the familiar world has receded and the stories we tell ourselves have dissolved, we are left to confront our barest fears and self-accusations. Paul Lynch submerges us in the wildness of our own minds; I resurfaced changed.”

— Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing

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“I highly recommend Paul Lynch’s stunning Beyond the Sea, another tour de force from the Limerick man.”

— Donal Ryan, Irish Examiner

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“Two men on a boat, adrift in the middle of the ocean. With "Beyond the Sea", Irishman Paul Lynch has written a brilliant, sensitive and touching novel about the human condition.”

— Jean-Claude Vantroyen, Le Soir, (Belgium) 

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“As painful as it is captivating, this novel is a true performance, since it deploys a wealth of experience and intensity based on a very slim set-up, and once again proves that Paul Lynch is an author for whom every word must have its necessity…. another opportunity for a tremendous lesson in faith in humanity.”

— La Libre Belgique 

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“From a survival story, from an adventure novel, Beyond the Sea transforms into a metaphysical experience [where] the author reveals with fascination and, it must be said, horror, the progressive destitution of the human soul...     To be capable of such a thing in some 200 pages is not a matter of prowess but of genius.”

— Hebdoscopoe 

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"One of the great writers of today... We think of Melville throughout these stormy pages, rich in the best that the seaside novel can produce, a mixture of harshness and melancholy.

— Marianne