BOOK 7: PROPHET SONG, PAUL LYNCH, #bookerprize2023 

“All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”
It’s a heart rending, dystopian tale which is scary because I cannot imagine myself in this situation. There is warmth and a protective feeling when all the members of a family are around and safe. The moment a person in a family goes missing every member of the family is shaken up, missing the person terribly and that’s exactly what the author has vividly and chillingly portrayed and much more. 
The book gives a creepy feeling, like George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s The trial, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale or Anna Burn’s Milkman, but it’s a lot more .Its about a lady’s struggle at keeping her family safe after her husband has been taken away by people from this totalitarian government. Her husband is an active member of the Teachers union of Ireland who’s striving to make the teachers condition better.
It is painful to see Eilish suffer and running from pillar to post looking for her husband Larry. A mother of four children, Eilish herself is a scientist but goes through hell trying to protect her family and she finds herself in such harrowing circumstances and has to decide for herself, what is best for her family. 
“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.”
It’s a novel that reads so real that it’s bound to give nightmares because such situations do exist in this world and the author has brilliantly concocted this tale showcasing this tyrannical system that ruins peoples lives. 
I’m glad it’s been shortlisted and maybe this could be the one!