Join the Bondi Literary Salon for our first March book club, hosted by Dave Francis! In our gathering, we will be discussing the 2023 Booker Prize Winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

WHEN: Tuesday, 12th March, 2024, at Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore, please arrive at 6.45pm for a prompt 7pm start.

TICKETS: Admission; $25.00 (excluding external fees). Your ticket includes a drink on arrival and nibbles duting the evening.

The 2023 Winner of the Booker Prize

About the Book:

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her doorstep. Two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police want to speak with her husband, Larry, a trade unionist for the Teachers' Union of Ireland. Things are falling apart. Ireland is in the grip of a government that is taking a turn towards tyranny. And as the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society - assailed by unpredictable forces beyond her control and forced to do whatever it takes to keep her family together.

Exhilarating, terrifying, propulsive and confrontational, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality and devastating insight, a novel that can be read as a parable of the present, the future and the past.

About the Author:

Before Prophet Song, which is the winner of the Booker Prize 2023, Paul Lynch wrote four novels: Beyond the Sea, Grace, The Black Snow and Red Sky in Morning. His third novel, Grace, won the 2018 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors’ Literary Award. His second novel, The Black Snow, won France’s bookseller prize, Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel.

About the Booker Prize

The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.

Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career.

The Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969. Its aim was to stimulate the reading and discussion of contemporary fiction. The hope was that newly published work would eventually become as central to Anglophone culture as Francophone fiction was to France, thanks to the Prix Goncourt.

The publishers Tom Maschler and Graham C Greene, who came up with the idea, found a backer in Booker McConnell, a conglomerate with a significant long-term presence in Guyana. The company had recently acquired a commercial interest in literary estates.

Ian Fleming, a good friend and golfing partner of Booker Chairman Jock Campbell, had died in 1964. Before he did, Campbell established an ‘authors’ division’ within Booker, and bought (for £100,000) a 51 per cent share in the profits from worldwide royalties on Fleming’s books. The Booker Authors’ Division would go on to acquire the copyrights of Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer and Harold Pinter, among others.

Thus a prize for writers and readers of the Commonwealth – not just Britain – was born. In 1969, the inaugural Booker Prize was awarded to P.H. Newby for his novel Something to Answer For. Thirty years later, Booker Chairman Michael Caine would write that ‘The Booker Prize can trace its origin, through quirks of history and the imaginativeness of one individual, to James Bond and the attainment of political freedom in Guyana’. (Guyana had gained independence in 1966.)

The life of the Booker Prize over the past half-century has exceeded the imaginings of its founders several times over. The BBC first televised the prize ceremony in 1976, and the level of conversation, competition and controversy increased exponentially in the years that followed. In the 21st century, winning the Booker Prize can change a writer’s life, and grant him or her a readership for many decades to come.

About the Host

Dave has been a long time Bondi Literary Salon fan, and avid reader from an early age thanks to both parents filling him with a love of words and stories. He has a degree in English Lit from Otago University which helped with his love of the classics and poetry, and has recently (re) dived into a Shakespeare rabbit hole. Some of Dave's favourite books include: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

About Bondi Literary Salon

Bondi Literary Salon was established in 2018, it is the in-house book club of beloved Bondi institution, Gertrude & Alice. The Bondi Literary Salon endeavors to explore the vast world of literature each month, with a selection that reflects a focus on diverse writers and stories; delving into both classic and contemporary fiction, as well as non-fiction.

Our philosophy has always been to use language and literature not only as a tool for connection and community, but as an insight to worlds we have not had the pleasure of visiting ourselves. We welcome all - young and old, those with a life-long love of literature, or whose relationship may be only beginning. Join us in the unmatched comfort of an after-hours bookstore, accompanied by wine and cheese, for an evening spent discussing books and building community.

About Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore

Rated as one of the top 10 bookstores in the world by National Geographic, Gertrude & Alice Cafe Bookstore is an oasis for writers, readers, and coffee lovers. Books overflow from the shelves of their store, featuring a mix of new, second-hand, antiquarian and rare books. Stay a while & enjoy some home made chai, and amazing coffee, and unearth a book treasure or two. Read more about the bookstore's story here, and about the real Gertrude & Alice here.