Paul Lynch's 2023 Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song is a speedboat of a novel that hurtles the reader through ever-heightening waves toward a dark shore, a stark vision of total societal breakdown.

The narrative follows Eilish Stack, a microbiologist living in suburban Dublin with her husband, Larry, the deputy general secretary of the Irish teachers' union, and their four children, the oldest a teenager and the youngest an unexpected, late-in-life baby. Her father, showing early signs of dementia, lives nearby. Eilish's mind perpetually buzzes with the kinds of thoughts about work and kids and home that sustain a privileged, ordinary life held together by the almost invisible braces of a functioning civil society.

Lynch sets this world to spinning when the police arrive at the family home, looking for Larry. The authoritarian ruling party has introduced emergency...