Illutration by Lucy Naland

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch review – Ireland under fascism

This Booker-longlisted dystopia with shades of Cormac McCarthy is nightmarish yet horribly convincing

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Melissa Harrinson
Tuesday 31 August 2023

T

he Irish offspring of The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel is as nightmarish a story as you’ll come across: powerful, claustrophobic and horribly real. From its opening pages it exerts a grim kind of grip; even when approached cautiously and read in short bursts it somehow lingers, its world leaking out from its pages like black ink into clear water.

Summerwater by Sarah Moss review / A dark holiday in Scotland

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Summerwater by Sarah Moss review – a dark holiday in Scotland

Everyone is hiding something and the rain won’t stop in the Ghost Wall writer’s nightmarish tale of a day spent holidaying by a loch

Melissa Harrinson

Wed 26 August 2020

 

L

ike a dim shape shifting in the depths of a loch, there is something very dark at work just out of sight in Sarah Moss’s seventh novel. Its title is a reference to “The Ballad of Semerwater” by the poet William Watson, itself based on a legend in which the waters of a lake rise up and drown a village, sparing only the household who have offered a stranger from a distant land food and drink.