Tariq Goddard – författare

In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire Sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bedbound and complaining of a rare bone disease that no doctor can diagnose, her husband fears that the house they have purchased is a portal through which an older, more malign energy has passed, possessing his wife and son. Through their successive deterioration, his secular and agnostic worldview undergoes a metamorphosis, drawing him to a strange man from the hills the Rector, their unlikely saviour or are he and his family merely victims of their own selfserving yuppie way of life?

Set in a fictional African state in the grip of a civil war provoked by the emergence of The Mahdi, a pretender to the leadership of the Islamic world, The Message is the latest thriller from Tariq Goddard, an exciting and topical treatment of realpolitik, personal integrity and the real cost of Empire-building. Into the melting pot are thrown Iranian advisors, an SAS contingent, and in the best farcical tradition; a family of unscrupulous English mercenaries, kidnappers of an innocent girl with their own sinister agenda. In the face of violence and unexpected betrayals we see these factions draw inexorably together to a chilling and ultimately redemptive climax. With guarded sentimentality and cheerful nihilism, redolent of Conrad with just the slightest nod to Chuck Norris, The Message is as enjoyable as it is thoughtful, a literary take on current affairs from a rare and unusual talent.

"I don't have any heroes, they're all useless", opined John Lydon in 1976.As a spokesperson of sorts for the punk generation, Lydon was giving voice to a nihilistic, deconstructive impulse which, for better or worse, would go on to dominate the next half-century or so of intellectual, cultural and political life. But isn't one of the problems with the modern world that we no longer have any real sense of what heroism is? What if we recovered heroism from the hands of the fascists and the neoliberal ideologues, and proclaimed that - despite everything - a hero can and should be something to be?In these personal, provocative essays, the authors behind the uncompromising project that is Repeater Books come together to redefine the idea of the hero for a twenty-first-century public which desperately needs something to believe in. From Eric Cantona to Wile E Coyote, Bruno Latour to Paula Rego, forgotten legends and anonymous family members, this compendium of extraordinary human behaviour is essential reading for anyone who has ever thought that, despite what Jean-Paul Sartre said, heaven is other people.