[1][2][3] They settled in the north of Inishowen, a peninsula on the northern coastline of Ulster, with Lynch spending the rest of his childhood and teenage years at Malin Head and, later, in Carndonagh.

[6] The novel was inspired by a TV documentary about the excavation of Duffy's Cut, a site near Philadelphia where, in the 1830s, Irish emigrants, mainly from Ulster, were discovered in an unmarked mass grave.

[7] Lynch's second novel, The Black Snow, describes the return of an Irish emigrant to his native community in County Donegal and the subsequent descent into tragedy when a byre catches fire.

[12] In a review, The New York Times said: "Lynch is a sure-footed tightrope walker...his lush, poetic prose [in Grace] deliberately and painfully acts as a foil to the reality of the famine.

[14] The novel has been compared to the work of Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, William Golding, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Pablo Neruda by various reviewers,[14] and won France's Prix Gens de Mers in 2022.

[20][21][22][23][24] Lynch's writing has been described as "bold, grandiose, mesmeric," and he has been compared to authors such as Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Seamus Heaney, and Samuel Beckett.