Prophet Song

 Paul Lynch

2023, 9780861545896

I bought using book token from Gayle at ISL.

Good, well-written book but hard to say it's enjoyable given the storyline.

Set in contemporary Ireland, but where the government turns to become a totalitarian state.
The story follows the lives and choices made by the Stack family.

It is gripping, but....

the reviews indicate that it is an important book for our times but I don't know what you would learn really. It taught us that you can't fight such a regime without fatalities and the remaining members of the Stack family end up fleeing the country in a most tortuous and desperate way, and really one feels that the best choice would have been to leave as soon as they sensed trouble was in the offing. What was the point of fighting for the cause?
Especially as the areas that were taken back by the rebels ended up with the same repressive order.
Humans eh!

Also this life as experienced by Eilish is what has been happening to people the world over who had 'normal' lives vanish into thin air, e.g. Afghanistan and Lebanon, Gaza.
So not the 'dystopian future' reviewers wowsered over.

The narrative is told unconventionally, with run-on sentences, no paragraph breaks and dialogue without quotation marks and the text is fully justified.
Some people didn't seem to like this but I liked it - it was a clever device to really immerse you into the rather claustrophobic situation and made the writing interesting.