The Black Prophet centres upon an unsolved murder and the love affair between the niece of the victim and the son of his supposed killer, and the plot unfolds against the powerfully rendered background of the famine and typhus epidemic of 1817, which Carleton had witnessed at first hand. Yeats praised the novel's 'sombre and passionate dialogue', and said that 'all nature, and not merely man's nature, seems to pour out for me its inbred fatalism.' (Goodreads)