GRACE debuted in the US on 11 July 2017 to much praise, from reviewers in publications as wide-ranging as The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, The Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly and more. Grace will be published in Ireland on 7 September 2017 and in the UK on 21 September.
The novel has been selected as an Editors’ Choice pick in the New York Times Book Review: “The Irish writer’s third novel raises timeless questions about suffering and survival through the story of two children expelled from their impoverished home in the midst of the Great Famine. When you’re starving, Lynch seems to be asking, are you truly alive?”
In the Washington Post, Jon Michaud called ‘Grace’ “a moving work of lyrical and at times hallucinatory beauty…. a picaresque that reads like a hybrid of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road'”.
In The Boston Globe, Margot Livesey said that “Grace’’ belongs to several great traditions — the picaresque novel, the coming-of-age novel, and the orphan novel…. Not surprisingly “Grace’’ is a relentless novel, but Lynch allows his heroine a true complexity of feeling — about her brother, her mother, Bart, and what she sees happening around her — that allows the reader to empathize even as we wring our hands. ‘Grace’’ is not only a gripping tale about an appalling period in history — although that would be quite enough — but also, sadly, piercingly relevant; this year in East Africa 20 million people are facing starvation.”
Esquire magazine called ‘Grace’ “one of the best books of the year so far”. It was a Book of the Week in Publishers Weekly, as well as receiving a starred review in both PW and Kirkus.
In an interview, the Sunday Times said, “Grace combines the picaresque coming-of-age adventures of Voltaire’s Candide with the post-apocalyptism of Cormac McCarthy’s Road and the epic expanse of Homer’s The Odyssey.”