Tears of the Patriarch
On sale
18th February 2027
Price: £20
Genre
Heading into early middle-age as a rockstar and acid house diva is a troubling business, fraught with hazards – most of them of your own making, certainly avoidable. Pushing 40, still wearing a soiled nappy on stage – albeit at Paris Fashion Week – the second book from bestselling author Lias Saoudi represents a reckoning with ageing (dis)gracefully, the hazards and vulnerabilities of life on the road with various reprobates and, most importantly, the rite of passage that is becoming a father. How to reconcile rock ‘n’ roll performance art with the arrival of your first born? What does it mean to be a man growing up as one of three brothers of Algerian descent in a 21st century Britain that is increasingly fractured and riven with identity politics and then become father to a beautiful daughter after a life lived with reckless hedonism?
With unsparing humour and self-lacerating honesty, Tears of the Patriarch takes a machete to the culture wars and rearranges the pieces with the stylish swagger of a man on the edge of either implosion or revelation as his eternal adolescence enters its final furlong. From an occult ritual on a remote Irish beach with the darkest of consequences to a spell in the Algerian clink when a satirical Fat Whites promo video goes wrong, this is a book that only Lias Saoudi could write: profane, profound, daring and unforgiving – mostly of himself, but most certainly – also – of the hollow world we have created where speaking truth to power has become a pathetic Instagram meme and the word masculinity is rarely spoken of without the prefix ‘toxic’?
With unsparing humour and self-lacerating honesty, Tears of the Patriarch takes a machete to the culture wars and rearranges the pieces with the stylish swagger of a man on the edge of either implosion or revelation as his eternal adolescence enters its final furlong. From an occult ritual on a remote Irish beach with the darkest of consequences to a spell in the Algerian clink when a satirical Fat Whites promo video goes wrong, this is a book that only Lias Saoudi could write: profane, profound, daring and unforgiving – mostly of himself, but most certainly – also – of the hollow world we have created where speaking truth to power has become a pathetic Instagram meme and the word masculinity is rarely spoken of without the prefix ‘toxic’?