'Lynch demonstrates a control over his ideas that comes from a pure lyrical telling, a speech act that, if you let it, will take you anywhere. Beyond the Sea is frightening but beautiful.'
Beyond the Sea
From the winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, 2018
Paul Lynch
Chosen as a Book of the Year by Sebastian Barry, Martina Devlin and Peter Cunningham
Winner of the Prix Gens de Mer, 2022
Hector and Bolivar set sail from their South American fishing village on what they believe to be a routine expedition. But then a devastating storm casts them adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With no means of contacting the outside world and no sign of rescue, their only hope lies with one another. Both men must confront the truth about themselves, and the regrets that they have spent a lifetime trying to forget, if they are to survive.
Part gripping story of resilience, part fearless existential parable, Beyond the Sea is a meditation on what it means to be human, in a world that pushes us to the brink.
Reviews
Guardian
'[Lynch’s] novels are artistic creations…this absorbing book is an evocative one…His fourth novel has echoes of Melville, Dostoyevsky and William Golding…But the literary work it most invokes is Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'
Sunday Times
'Such an aching sense of spaciousness feels in the spirit of its exotic setting, of Latin American sensualists such as Paulo Coelho or Pablo Neruda, or the deep eastern wisdoms of Hermann Hesse... Beyond the Sea deserves a special place in Lynch's increasingly fascinating and diverse catalogue.'
Irish Independent
'Lynch has mastered the art of capturing his characters' anguish, and there is an enigmatic lyricism to his storytelling… The story is fantastically written, a truly magnificent portrayal of the gritty battle between despair and hope.'
RTE
'A lucid, lyrical tale of two lost men… The language attains a poetic intensity that is unusual and well earned.'
Irish Times
'Paul Lynch won the Irish Novel of the Year 2018 for Grace, a lushly lyrical adventure story set in Famine-era Ireland. His follow-up...[is] a short but absorbing tale of the lengths to which people go to avoid admitting who they really are.'
Metro
'Masterly.'
Sebastian Barry, author of Days Without End
'I finished this exquisite, meticulous, powerful novel...this afternoon. A fisherman and a youth adrift on the Pacific in a fishing boat. Nothing & everything happens, often at the same time. And what a stylist.'
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
'Brutal and poetic... Alive with elegance and insight.'
TLS
'Blew me away...a beautifully written and tightly controlled novel about the human spirit and what happens when it is pushed to the limit.'
Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of The Narrow Land
'[This] stark, mesmerizing book reads like an existential argument between [life's] irreconcilable truths, a Beckett play bobbing in the open water...this fine book contains multitudes of experience.'
Wall Street Journal
'The writing is vivid…conveying the claustrophobic reality of confinement in a small vessel.'
Irish Examiner
Paul Lynch
Paul Lynch is the author of the novels Red Sky in Morning, The Black Snow, Grace and Beyond the Sea. Grace won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018 and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing 2018. The Black Snow won France’s Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and was a finalist for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize). He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children. His website is www.paullynchwriter.com
Author page
