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World

Why Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song is one of the strangest books of all time

2 December 2023

5:30 PM

2 December 2023

5:30 PM

The 2024 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a novel about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’, not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written.

By definition, most novels are stories rendered from imagined events, set in the past, present or future.

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