The 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. 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.
Lynch has form when it comes to dark subjects, having previously written about violence and revenge in fledgling America (Red Sky in Morning, his debut), a deadly blaze at a rural
