From the Booker Prize-winning author of Prophet Song, a sweeping, Dickensian story of a young girl on a life-changing journey across nineteenth-century Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine. Early one October morning, Grace's 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 her in men's clothing and casts her out. When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a remarkable odyssey in the looming shadow of their country's darkest hour. The broken land they pass through reveals untold suffering as well as unexpected beauty. To survive, Grace must become a boy, a bandit, a penitent and, finally, a woman -- all the while afflicted by inner voices that arise out of what she has seen and what she has lost. Told in bold and lyrical language by an author who has already been called "one of his generation's very finest novelists" (Ron Rash, author of The Risen ), Grace is an epic coming-of-age novel and a poetic evocation of the Irish famine as it has never been written. PRAISE FOR GRACE "Grace is a story of ghosts but it isn't a ghost story. G race is a story of the Great Famine, but it's not narrowly political. G race is a tale of misery, but it's not a misery memoir. Lynch is a sure-footed tightrope walker....his lush, poetic prose deliberately and painfully acts as a foil to the reality of the famine."― Katherine Grant , The New York Times Book Review "A moving work of lyrical and at times hallucinatory beauty... Grace reads like a hybrid of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Cormac McCarthy's The Road ...Grace is a plucky, headstrong survivor, and she survives a great deal in the course of this book...There is an undercurrent of populist ire that resonates with our own turbulent times...The readers of this novel will care a great deal about the fates of Grace and her fellow travelers."― John Michaud , The Washington Post Lynch never shies away from the subject matter...but he entwines it all with prose that sways from brutally realistic scenes into the fullness of the landscape and back again in just a few words...In Lynch's deft hands I found myself enthralled as Grace cuts herself a path through a forbidding world."― Johanna Zwirner , The Paris Review " Grace belongs to several great traditions--the picaresque novel, the coming-of-age novel, and the orphan novel.... The familiar world was made new, in the worst way, by the famine; Lynch makes it new again by his prose.... Not surprisingly Grace is a relentless novel, but Lynch allows his heroine a true complexity of feeling that allows the reader to empathize even as we wring our hands. Grace is not only a gripping tale about an appalling period in history--although that would be quite enough--but also, sadly, piercingly relevant."― Margot Livesey , Boston Globe "An epic tale of endurance, which in Lynch's deft hands is harrowing and simultaneously starkly beautiful."― Angela Ledgerwood , Esquire "In 19th-century Ireland, with the Great Famine looming, a young girl named Grace embarks on a journey and comes of age across a landscape rife with suffering and flashes of beauty."― Caroline Rogers , Southern Living "It's 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. Separated by a tragedy soon after they are expelled from home to fend for themselves, Colly's irresistible voice continues to ring in Grace's ears. What ensues is full of incident and grotesques, fizzing with adventure, a counter to the enervating effects of their starvation. But gradually it becomes a darker book as hunger eats away at humanity - and the darker it gets, the more [Lynch's] unerring gifts are confirmed."― Stephanie Cross , The Daily Mail UK "Rich prose, dense with meaning...a profound and unusual coming-of-age story."― The Sunday Times UK "The prose flows like good Irish whiskey and compels readers to keep drinking in Lynch's words; sometimes so poetic they read like a James Joyce novel."― Kathe Robin , RT Book Review "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.... Sentence after sentence pulls you up in your tracks and has you rereading."― Frank O'Shea , Sydney Morning Herald "As a writer, Lynch is sui generis. His style is bold, grandiose, mesmeric. He strives for large effects, wrestles with big ideas. In Melville's formulation, he is one of those writers who dares "to dive" into the darkest recesses of the soul, risking all to surface clutching the pearl."― Bert Wright , The Sunday Times Ireland " Grace shares the linguistic virtuos