The Prophet Song

Huge hype with this one and I really enjoyed it. This won the Booker Prize last year and it describes the Republic of Ireland having descended into this totalitarian regimen with the National Allince Party having seizured control of the country in response to lobbying by trade unionists. This leads to civil war.

“All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”

The citizens did not realise that its liberties had been quashed until it was too late. We then follow the nightmarish journey of the Stack family during this “great waking” that draws necessarily frightening parallels to ongoing wars in 2024 and in the UK, the vile way that our country treats those fleeing persecution. The scary thing about this book is even though it describes this dystopia, it feels real, and it feels possible.

This book felt like it was a call to arms to all of us to find our empathy for those experiencing the most horrible human rights atrocities. Policymakers subscribe to populism. Be woke. Be wide awake, because the alternative, is to be fast asleep.

I love this but my only wish was to have had a bit more on why and how this happened in the first place but I’m nit picking. This was great and for me, absolutely lived up to the hype.