Red or Dead

Goldsmiths Prize judge Nicola Barker on Red or Dead:

"Love and madness both involve the most devastating repetitions, and David Peace's Red or Dead is at once a broken heart and a nervous breakdown. It is monolithic. It is unrelenting. It is truly brave and it is utterly heroic. It's a maddeningly stuck record which just happens to be jumping backwards and forwards over the most astonishing of refrains. And the more you hear that refrain the more it contracts and then expands inside your mind. The more it hypnotises. You are numbed by it and then suddenly, unexpectedly, you are pierced by it; verbally, emotionally.

I don't think I've ever read anything quite like Red or Dead before. Not ever. Peace has created the perfect mantra for life, for love, for obsession, for sport. And that mantra is a strange and ecstatic 714-page prayer."

From the bestselling author of The Damned Utd comes the story of Bill Shankly, perhaps the first truly great football manager of the modern age.

In 1959, Liverpool Football Club were in the Second Division. Liverpool Football Club had never won the FA Cup. Fifteen seasons later, Liverpool Football Club had won three League titles, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup. Liverpool Football Club had become the most consistently successful team in England. And the most passionately supported club. Their manager was revered as a god. Destined for immortality. Their manager was Bill Shankly. His job was his life. His life was football. His football a form of socialism. Bill Shankly inspired people. Bill Shankly transformed people. The players and the supporters. His legacy would reveberate through the ages.

In 1974, Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly stood on the verge of even greater success. In England and in Europe. But in 1974, Bill Shankly shocked Liverpool and football. Bill Shankly resigned. Bill Shankly retired.

Red or Dead is the story of the rise of Liverpool Football Club and Bill Shankly. And the story of the retirement of Bill Shankly. Of one man and his work. And of the man after that work. A man in two halves. Home and away. Red or dead.

David Peace - named in 2003 as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists - was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty and Nineteen Eighty Three) which has been adapted into a three part Channel 4 series that aired in Spring 2009, GB84 which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Award, and The Damned Utd, the film version of which (adapted by Peter Morgan and starring Michael Sheen) was released in Spring 2009. Tokyo Year Zero, the first part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy, was published in 2007, and the second part, Occupied City, in 2009.

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