Mark O’Connell’s book attracted a lot of press attention when it was published last year. It’s not hard to see why. It tells the remarkable true story of Malcolm Macarthur, an educated, cultivated, and once affluent man who murdered two strangers in Ireland in 1982. Macarthur was finally apprehended by the police while living at the home of Ireland’s Attorney General, a detail that made the murders all the more notorious and caused political shockwaves at the time.

A Thread of Violence is, in some respects, a straightforward and accomplished piece of reportage, likely to appeal to true crime enthusiasts. What makes it distinctive, I think, is the author’s highly conflicted relationship with Macarthur. In spite of O’Connell’s very best efforts, he gets nowhere close to understanding what truly motivated Macarthur to commit his appalling crimes. Whatever one thinks of the author’s examination (and self-examination), it remains one of the most compelling and mysterious cases of recent decades.

Some novels arrive at just the right time, catching the zeitgeist or perhaps foretelling it. Prophet Song is such a novel, landing when politics have shifted to the right in many countries and at a moment when familiar protections and liberties are under threat in places where, not so long ago, they were inviolate. Intolerance is on the march. Truth is in retreat.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song imagines an Ireland of the not-so-distant future in which trade unionists are snatched from their homes by shadowy “security services”, where peaceful protestors are shot in the street, where children are tortued, and where fealty to the ruling party determines who prospers and who comes under suspicion. The judges of The Booker Prize in 2023 called it “soul-shattering and true”, a novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”. Comparisons have been made to George Orwell.

The encroaching tyranny is seen through the eyes of Eilish Stack, someone ordinary in the ways all of us are ordinary, someone making an ordinary life through her family and her work. But nothing is ordinary when evil knocks at the door and Eilish’s quiet, unexceptional life is shattered gradually but entirely. What should she do? Leave and save her family or stay in the hope that the madness and badness will pass eventually?

Lynch’s novel deserves all the praise and prizes that come its way. It isn’t perfect. It is sometimes overwritten and its lyricism is occasionally intrusive, but these are small gripes. Prophet Song is very powerful, but little of its power is really to do with its timeliness. It reminds us that the slide into intolerance, brutality, and evil is one that happens incrementally. By the time many of us wake up to what is happening, it is already far too late.

Regular readers of The Times Literary Supplement know and love its NB column. It was written by James Campbell (J.C.) for more than twenty years. NB by J.C. is a compilation of those weekly columns between 2001 and 2020. J.C.’s patch is the literary world, but he interprets his job quite widely. Grammar, writerly reputations and rivalries, book prizes, pronunciation, the art of the translator, and much, much more attract his attention. Whatever the week’s topic, his style is unmistakable. Wry, teasing, ironic, and, more often than not, laugh-out-loud funny. This is a book to be dipped into and enjoyed time and time again.