The talent of a writer also consists of knowing how to give up. In 2018, Irish novelist Paul Lynch had been working on his fifth book for six months when he decided to throw in the towel. The story he was telling, he judged, was not working. He closed his document on a Friday, opened another on Monday without knowing where it would take him. And the first sentences of Song of the Prophet gushed out. The novel that would win him the Booker Prize in 2023 was on its way. “A lot of things had occupied my mind in the previous monthsconfides Paul Lynch today to “World of Books”. The election of Trump, Brexit, a massive influx of Syrian refugees into Europe had changed politics, with a shift to the right. I felt like a fundamental change had occurred. There appeared in the political sphere a tolerance for opinions which had not been accepted until then. »
And The Song of the Prophet relates the advent of a dictatorship in contemporary Ireland and its repercussions on a middle-class family, Lynch refuses to see it as a dystopian novel, as the facts it depicts are so current. Ten years after his first book, A red sky in the morning (2014, ed. Albin Michel, like all his books), we find his favorite themes there. Themes which, Grace (2019) to Beyond the sea (2021), via Black Snow (2015), express human dismay in the face of a world, intimate or global, which is fracturing.
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