Grace: From the Booker Prize-winning author of Prophet Song

(Hardback)

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Early one October morning, Graces mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, You are the strong one now. With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits Grace in mens clothing and casts her out. When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a lifechanging odyssey in the looming shadow of the Great Famine. To survive, Grace will become a boy, a bandit, a penitent and finally, a woman. A meditation on love, life and destiny, Grace is an epic coming-of-age novel, and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written.

Reviews

The Irish writers third novel raises timeless questions about suffering and survival through the story of two children expelled from their impoverished home in the midst of the Great Famine. When youre starving, Lynch seems to be asking, are you truly aliveEditors' Choice, The New York Times Book Review

This book is one of the most beautiful I have read in a long time. Heart wrenching and so moving, with language that makes your soul sing.Caitriona Balfe, actress and star of Outlander

A profound and unusual coming-of-age story. The Sunday Times

A shudderingly well written, dead-real, hallucinatory trip across Famine Ireland.Emma Donoghue, author of Room

Haunting and poetic Lynch has given us poignant glimpses of the human bodys limits, that peculiar messiness of identity, and what happens when parts of a society fail to help, or even acknowledge, those in need.Irish Times

Lynch is frighteningly skilled...searing images into the mind and forcing you to press carefully through sentences as if they are strips of long grass.Sunday Independent, (Dublin)

Lynchhas a particular gift for finding the unexpected yet compelling image that conveys the anomalous nature of this otherworld. [The] poetic prose is at deliberate odds withthe stark horror it depicts, and yetthe four blank, black pages at the terribleclimax of Graces journey are as eloquent asanything else on the unspeakable tragedy of the Famine. TLS

Lynch brilliantly conveys the rabid effects of the famine on his charactersand he offers us a worthy heroine to guide us through it.Irish Examiner

A literary beauty It is the saddest, heaviest, most beautiful, lyrical [novel], one of the most stunning books Ive read in recent times. I would urge you to read it.Ryan Tubridy, The Tubridy Show, RTE

An epic tale of endurance, which in Lynch's deft hands is harrowing and simultaneously starkly beautiful.Esquire, (Best Books of 2017 So Far)

When you finish, you feel like saying "wow". Under your breath perhaps, but do not be hard on yourself if you shout it out, because this is a work of staggering beauty and deep insight. Sydney Morning Herald

Lynchs wonderful third novel follows a teenage girl through impoverished Ireland at the height of the Great FamineLynchs powerful, inventive language intensifies the poignancy of the woe that characterizes this world of have-nothings struggling to survive.Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

A beautifully written novel, with a haunting story and deep echoes of the Ancients.Edna OBrien, author of The Country Girls

Lynch makes the page sing like the old masters.Philipp Meyer, author of The Son

The power of Paul Lynch's imagination is truly startling; his ability to inhabit and deeply understand the moments, both slight and shattering, of a life and of an era translates into an instinct not just for story, but for the most hidden, most forceful currents of language and what they can do.Belinda McKeon, author of Tender

'As a writer, Lynch is sui generis. His style is bold, grandiose, mesmeric. He strives for large effects, wrestles with big ideas... Lynch has been compared to greats such as Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner and Beckett, while others have located him in the Irish gothic tradition of Stoker and le Fanu.'The Sunday Times (Ireland)

Awork of great lyricism. Its beautiful prose is put to devastating effect in his vivid story of the Irish potato famine, which killed at least a million people... Lynchs narrative gripped us from the start and never let us go.It haunted the judges long after the final line.The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Judges

A mesmerizing, incandescent work of art... An exhilarating, Odyssean, heartpounding, glorious story, wrought by a novelist with the eye and the ear and the heart of an absolute master.Donal Ryan, Booker-nominated author ofThe Spinning Heart

Lynch never shies away from the subject matterthe impossibly gruelling winters Grace faces, the people she meets and can never trust, the heartbreak of losing a family member... In Lynchs deft hands I found myself enthralled as Grace cuts herself a path through a forbidding world.Johanna Zwirner, The Paris Review

Its not just style that makes this an unforgettable book. Its heroine, 14-year-old Grace, may not have much to say for herself, but her younger brother, Colly, is a gleefully riddling, smutty delight. Gradually [the book] becomes a darker book as hunger eats away at humanity and the darker it gets, the more [Lynchs] unerring gifts are confirmed.Daily Mail

Author Bio

Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow. He won France's Prix Libr' Nous for Best Foreign Novel, and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and daughter.