Paul Lynch: ‘The idea of not being around for my children was the most distressing feeling I’ve ever had’

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“I just couldn’t believe this had happened to me,” Paul Lynch says. We’re sitting in his kitchen, in the back of his terraced house in Dublin 12. Last month, his fifth novel, Prophet Song, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but we’re talking here about the terrifying news that he received around this time last year. “I was 45, I was a health freak, I was fit,” Lynch says. But during a chest scan, a radiologist accidentally discovered a tumour on Lynch’s kidney. In that moment, his life was turned upside down. “I sat down on my reading chair and...