October 23, 2023
An Irish family is shattered by the rise of a radical right-wing party in this slow-burning dystopian novel from Lynch (Grace). In the near future, Ireland is governed by the National Alliance Party, an eerily totalitarian mutation of nationalist politics dating back to the Troubles. Their leaders employ a militant secret police force, which rounds up trade unionist Larry Stack after he participates in a protest march. Larry’s four children assume he’s been killed along with others “disappeared” by the NAP, but his wife, Eilish, is in denial and refuses to consider leaving for somewhere safer. Lynch renders Eilish’s inner world with relentless blocks of page-long paragraphs, unbroken even during conversations with her father, Simon, who, in his dementia, often blurs past and present (he describes NAP “thugs” as “trouble,” suggesting they are reminiscent of IRA soldiers). Some of this might be lost on readers unfamiliar with the history. Still, the momentum of the prose lends an air of portentousness to the narrative until Eilish’s denial finally crumbles as she claims the body of one of her sons, who has been tortured to death, from a military hospital. Readers well-versed in the context will find Lynch’s vision painfully plausible. Agent: Simon Trewin, Simon Trewin Creative.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable. For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father's growing dementia, her teenage daughter's depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can't abandon hope for her husband's and son's returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch's excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017). Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.

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Starred review from November 1, 2023
It's dark. There's a knock on the door. Eilish, a microbiologist, doesn't want to answer but she does, the baby squirming in her arms, two older kids squabbling over the TV remote, the oldest not home yet, neither is her husband, an administrator with Ireland's teachers' union. It's him the men want, two secret police officers with the increasingly brutal National Alliance. As everything goes inexorably from bad to worse for this loving family, we are privy to Eilish's churning thoughts, strategies, anger, and love. Her husband disappears. Restrictions and deprivations multiply. In a moment of lucidity, Eilish's increasingly senile scientist father says, "if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief . . . change what you and I call reality." Irish writer Lynch (Beyond the Sea, 2020) conveys the creeping horror of a fascist catastrophe in a gorgeous and relentless stream of consciousness illuminating the terrible vulnerability of our loved ones, our daily lives, and social coherence. Eilish muses over the fragility of the body, its rhythms and flows, diseases and defenses. The body politic is just as assailable. A Booker Prize finalist, Lynch's hypnotic and crushing novel tracks the malignant decimation of an open society, a bleak and tragic process we enact and suffer from over and over again.

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