Dystopian novels are a literary mixed bag. Done well they can transform tiny seeds of present danger into a living, breathing, terrifying vision of a future. Done badly and they feel hammy, didactic, just a little bit YA.
The Limerick-born Paul Lynch is used to working in the past. His 2013 debut novel, Red Sky in Morning, is set in 1830s Ireland and New York; Grace was set during the Irish famine. But in Prophet Song, recently longlisted for the Booker prize, he imagines a near-future Ireland that is transformed into a police state and descends into civil war. We observe these horrors through the eyes of Eilish Slack, a scientist and mother of four, whose husband, Larry, is the deputy general secretary
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