***PRE-ORDER- Shipping February 2027***
Hardback, signed with lin=mited edition fanzine
Gnostic Sonics is proud to be a part of another incredible book launch in conjunction with White Rabbit.
A fearless dive into masculinity, fatherhood and ageing from the cult frontman
Lias Saoudi
‘Would I have been better off with a life of engineering and Allah like my cousins? I doubt they wake up with blood in their mouths, callouses in their throats, at my age…’
What becomes of the transgressive shock-artist when decades spent chasing pleasure give way to the challenges of monogamy, parenthood and – whisper it – responsibility?
Bestselling author and singer of Fat White Family/Decius Lias Saoudi spares nothing in exposing the fears, indignities and consolations of an artist who has achieved neither vast success nor spectacular self-destruction. Painfully funny and self-laceratingly honest, Tears of the Patriarch finds Saoudi asking urgent questions of a world riven with identity politics and cultural homogenisation, all the while swerving sinkholes of despond born of a chronic attraction to problematic but gifted men.
From an occult ritual on a remote Irish beach with drastic consequences to time in an Algerian jail when a promo video goes wrong, from Paris fashion week to the traumatic birth of his first child, this is a book that only he could write: outrageous, impassioned and unforgiving – of himself primarily, but also of a world he’s convinced is out to get him.
Tears of the Patriarch sings the song of anyone who suspects there’s no art without affliction, no family without fury, and no love without tears.
Lias Saoudi said: ‘I was only dimly aware of the sheer scale of the bitterness, fear, jealousy, anger, resentment and confusion that was still brewing in me around the turn of the decade. By turning self-obsession into an aesthetic project, into a kind of game I could play with language I was able to at least arrive at a little clarity – clarity enough to go ahead with having a kid. I never thought I’d have a kid. That looked like hell to me. I now see it as the ultimate relief. Your dreams and aspirations are just not that important. You’re off the hook. You’re gladly the slave of this little being. This isn’t a book about that wide bend in the road… it is that wide bend in the road.’
Publisher Lee Brackstone said: ‘On the stage and now on the page, Lias Saoudi returns after the improbably commercial and crucial success of Ten Thousand Apologies with a book that is hilariously unsparing: of the culture wars and the death throes of rock ‘n’ roll, but mostly, of himself. A virtuoso literary stylist with a voice forged in the fires of afterhours conversations about mortality and glory, transcendence and debasement, Lias is back with a book which is both accepting of the fact he is now FORTY YEARS OLD but also raging against the dying of the hedonistic light/life…’
Lias Kaci Saoudi is a writer, artist and musician, best known for fronting genre-bending iconoclasts Fat White Family. Born to a British mother and Algerian father, he grew up in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Northern Ireland, before moving to London to study Fine Art at the Slade. His first book, Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure, co-written with Adelle Stripe (Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, Bloomsbury, 2019), is described by Miranda Sawyer in the Observer as “the story of a band that’s always on the brink: of stardom, of madness, of brilliance, of disgrace”. It was published by White Rabbit in 2022. Lias’s work has also been published by UnHerd, INQUE magazine, and The New Frontier: Reflections From the Irish Border (New Island Books, 2021) - an anthology of new writing from some of Ireland’s greatest contemporary authors marking the centenary of partition. Lias was also guest editor of Ambit Pop, a special issue of the venerable quarterly arts magazine.
