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Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, Grace, and Beyond the Sea. Grace won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018 and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 2018. The Black Snow won France's Prix Libr'à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
Paul Lynch's website
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The Irish novelist Paul Lynch has written five novels, among them The Black Snow and Beyond the Sea, that are widely admired for their poetic prose and thematic complexity. His latest, Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, $26), won the 2023 Booker Prize; it is an all-too-credible fable about democratic Ireland's descent into a police state, and its effect on a biologist, her trade unionist husband, and their children. Lynch spoke with Shelf Awareness about Prophet Song (reviewed in this issue)--the style of the novel, the 18th-century idea of the Sublime and its influence on this work, and the different understandings of the term "Socialist" in Europe and the U.S.
You address it in detail late in the novel, but, without giving anything away, can you discuss your choice of title?
I know from speaking with readers that the book's title may give the initial impression of omen. And of course, the novel can be read that way. But its deeper meaning is revealed much later in the book when Eilish, having ended what she must endure, is met with the realisation that the apocalypse, as proclaimed by the biblical prophets, is not in fact some sudden event, and that it is vanity to think that the world will just end in your lifetime. The ending...
Rumaan Alam is the author of Leave the World Behind, Rich and Pretty, and That Kind of Mother. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal,... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Prophet Song
Try:
Leave the World Behind
by Rumaan Alam
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Prophet Song
Try:
The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood
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