It’s spooky season! Help Housmans celebrate All Hallows Eve by welcoming Tariq Goddard to the shop for the (re)launch of his acclaimed work of political horror: The Picture of Contented New Wealth. One of the most important and era defining satires on Neoliberal Britain written during the dying days of New Labour, and anticipating, in it’s send-up of Thatcher’s premier, the cultural brutality of the Austerity years, The Picture of Contented New Wealth is as a vital and haunting now as it’s ever been.

In the brilliant red doom of a Hampshire sunset, Brigit Conti can hear a voice behind her ears that is not her own. Bed-bound 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 world-view 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 self-serving yuppie way of life?

The Picture of Contented New Wealth is a gothic tragedy set in the 1980s, bringing proper characterization and a literary sensibility to the traditional horror story. Its mix of generic elements and mystical realism deal with the irreducibility of evil and its successful normalization in to our daily and dominant reality.

TARIQ GODDARD is the author of seven novels including his 2002 debut, the Whitbread (latterly Costa) Prize shortlisted ‘Homage to a Firing Squad’ & 2017’s ‘Nature and Necessity’. He has been nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, & the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize & has co-edited two collections of essays, ‘The Repeater Book of the Occult’ & ‘The Repeater Book of Heroism’. His last book ‘High John the Conqueror’ was published by Repeater Books in 2022.

Tariq will be joined in conversation with ALEX NIVEN. Alex Niven comes from the north-east of England. He writes regularly for the Guardian, Tribune and New Statesman, and has also contributed to publications including the New York Times, the Independent, Pitchfork, The Face and VICE. He is the author of New Model Island (Repeater, 2019), and The North Will Rise Again (Bloomsbury). He is currently Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University, he helped to start the radical publisher Repeater Books in 2014.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + event entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 7pm, Event Starts 7:30.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO BYOB