The Prophet's Song

For the first time in Russian! The novel is a laureate of the Booker Prize 2023, which is already being called the ‘Irish “1984”’ and the ‘new “Handmaid’s Tale”’. As the Booker committee wrote in its recommendation, this ‘radical dystopia… vividly depicts a mother’s determination to protect her family at a time when liberal democracy… inexorably and frighteningly descends into totalitarianism’. One evening, microbiologist Ailish Stack, mother of four, answers a knock at the door. On the doorstep are two operatives of the newly formed State National Security Service, who would like to speak with Ailish’s husband, an activist in the teachers' union. After a protest demonstration, her husband disappears—and Ailish finds herself caught in the logic of a nightmare: public institutions are crumbling before her eyes, the government has turned a quiet suburb into a combat zone, and to save her family, Ailish is forced to take the impossible leap… ‘A cautionary novel about how easily we can lose the freedoms we take for granted; however, the greatest achievement of the author is that the incredible events described appear completely real’ (Sunday Independent).