Dear Great Book Guru,  We were at an amazing event last week - Dinner and The Dead - Dinner at Foster Restaurant here in Sea Cliff and The Dead - a dramatization of James Joyce’s most famous short story from the DUBLINERS.  Many of the guests were talking about the latest Man Booker Prize winner that was set in Dublin.  I am intrigued - thoughts?   Booker Prize Reader

Dear Booker Prize Reader, Yes, I always try to review the prestigious Booker Prize winner and this latest is a fascinating and disturbing read: PROPHET SONG  by Paul Lynch.  Set in Dublin a few years in the future, the novel describes a country cast into chaos by unnamed forces.  Eillish Stack, a scientist and mother of four children, is living a comfortable middle-class existence when her husband Larry, a union official, is arrested after participating in a peaceful demonstration with fellow teachers.  Eillish’s nightmare has begun as she tries valiantly to find him, keep her teenage children safe from conscription, her elderly father and infant fed, and her home intact.  The challenges of dealing with monolithic bureaucracy mount as she sees her chances of escaping over the border slip away.  Written with long painful sentences and no paragraph breaks, the novel moves with a feverish pace. Eillish is consumed with the mundane aspects of her life - cleaning her bomb-struck home, keeping milk in the fridge, choosing hair ribbons for her young daughter while the world around her is collapsing. Her sister in Canada offers her a way out but the moral cost is too great. Finally, we are left with the terrifying question - what would any of us do?