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.

For thirty-five years, two women frighten each other through the fading twilight of the last century, their existence an unacknowledged tragedy of manners. Confusing their duty to one another for the feelings they’re too busy to mention, their desire for “modest social success” ends by asphyxiating whatever lies within its grasp. From the art galleries of Manhattan Island to the pubs of the North Yorkshire Moors, Nature and Necessity is a wild reimagining of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a story of siblings battling for survival and supremacy, a war story without armies, and a warning that even the most promising and prosperous of lives can be crushed by the fear of uttering the confession: I love you.“This is a wonderfully in-depth journey into the lives of a remarkable family, dark, deep, funny and, above all, likeable.  I’m missing Petula and her children already.” – Pat Mills, creator of 2000AD. Further endorsements from Nail Griffiths, author of Grits, and Jonathan Meades, author of An Encyclopedia of Myself.

Even though they were mother and daughter they were known mostly as ‘the sisters’. It was a union that would lead them both into lives they wished they had not had. For thirty-five years, two women frighten each other through the fading twilight of the last century, their existence an unacknowledged tragedy of manners. Confusing their duty to one another for the feelings they’re too busy to mention, their desire for “modest social success” ends by asphyxiating whatever lies within its grasp. From the art galleries of Manhattan Island to the pubs of the North Yorkshire Moors, Nature and Necessity is a wild reimagining of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a story of siblings battling for survival and supremacy, a war story without armies, and a warning that even the most promising and prosperous of lives can be crushed by the fear of uttering the confession: I love you.

"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.

"I always wanted to be a writer, but I became a policeman instead."WESSEX, 2016. Teenagers are vanishing off the council estates of a small provincial city. A crop of herbs that are said to posses magical powers which only grow once every fifty years are found in the woods. A supernatural creature believed to be the guardian of the herbs is seen in nightmares. Rumours of orgiastic rituals on the estates of the rich and powerful excite the curious. And the Queen of England decides to celebrate her 90th birthday with a visit to the city’s famous cathedral spire. Into this madness, two ambitious detectives, one with doomed literary ambitions, seek to solve the mystery, their only lead that “posh people are taking our children”.Blending mysticism, class war, societal malfeasance and transcendence, High John The Conqueror identifies the point in our recent history when the ghosts of our past become the political monsters of the present.