It’s been more than a year since I read Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel Prophet Song, but I’ve been thinking more and more about it lately.

Prophet Song takes place in an alternate Dublin. Members of the newly formed secret police, established by a government turning towards totalitarianism, turn up on the doorstep of microbiologist Eilish asking for her husband, a senior official in the Teachers’ Union of Ireland. Soon, he disappears – along with hundreds of other civilians – and Eilish is left to look after their four children and her elderly father, fighting to hold the family together amid civil war.

Here’s what the Booker Prize judges had to say about the novel in 2023:

‘Prophet Song follows one woman’s attempts to save her family in a dystopic Ireland sliding further and further into authoritarian rule. It is a shocking, at times tender novel that is not soon forgotten. Propulsive and unsparing, it flinches away from nothing. This is an utterly brave performance by an author at the peak of his powers, and it is terribly moving.’

Over the last few years, I’ve read, and re-read, a number of dystopian novels. Somehow they seemed to provide the appropriate theme for plague times. But Prophet Song left me shaken. It is a tremendous achievement, telling a dark story of a society’s descent into war with implications for all of the western democracies.

“I didn’t write this book to specifically say ‘here’s a warning’, I wrote the book to articulate the message that the things that are happening in this book are occurring timelessly throughout the ages, and maybe we need to deepen our own responses to that kind of idea,” Lynch said, later adding that he is “distinctly not a political novelist”.

There’s a line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing that Lynch sought to use as an epigraph that speaks to his intention, but he couldn’t get permission in time for publication: “The task of the narrator is not an easy one … He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one.”’