Breathtaking.

Literally: there were several times while reading this I realized I was holding my breath.

Lynch’s book details a modern Ireland’s quick slide into a nightmare dystopia. It sees the world through the eyes of a mother trying to figure out how to keep her family together.

It’s easily one of the top five fiction books I’ve read this year.

Lynch is a stylist, and this is a book heavy on theme and emotion. Much of the action happens off page, and the long chapters are long paragraphs without breaks for punctuation, similar to José Saramago or Cormac McCarthy. The book demands close reading, not just to parse the story, but for the beauty of the language itself.

It likely connects differently for a parent. Lynch’s portrayal of mother Eilish’s fear and confusion were horrifyingly relatable, especially in the last chapter.

There were two things it brought to mind most strongly: it evoked the terror and uncertainty that ran throughout The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler.

Even more strongly it resembled the HBO series Years and Years, a claustrophobic and shocking story of the world falling apart, and the impact of it on a family. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it but feared every second of it. This was the same.

I couldn’t put it down, I read whole sections out loud to myself, but was fully dreading turning each page. It’s a book I will go back to again and again, and recommend widely.