‘Fiction has the ability to bypass our self defences’, Booker Prize award winner Paul Lynch says

This year’s prestigious Booker Prize has gone to the Irish author Paul Lynch for his fifth novel ‘Prophet Song’.

A dystopian vision of an Ireland that’s descended into dictatorship, it tells the story of a mother-of-four whose husband is taken away by the newly-formed secret police.

It was chosen from the shortlist days after violence involving far-right groups erupted on the streets of Dublin – the city it’s set in.