The Guard - Couverture souple

'A mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel' Guardian. (Guardian)

'a rich and gripping mix of all the ingredients that make for a truly haunting atmosphere' Writers' Hub. (Writers' Hub)

'a tremendous novel, often horrifically funny and always unsettling' Irish Times. (Irish Times)

'Terrin wastes no time sucking the audience into the narrative ... you simply won't want to put the book down until you find out exactly what's going on' Starburst Magazine. (Starburst Magazine)

'The Guard is so good, its world so minutely described and Michel so undeniably compelling that to suggest anything other than to pick this up and read it immediately would be to do it a disservice' SciFi Now. (SciFi Now)

'There's a cold and beautiful precision to Peter Terrin's writing, and a remorselessness and finally terrifying accretion of detail that begins by seeming fussy and ends by being unsettling' SFX. (SFX)

'This masterly surrealist study of contemporary society, by a Flemish original, is worthy of the great JG Ballard' Irish Times. (Irish Times)

'webs of Pinteresque paranoia ... Effectively horrid' Sunday Telegraph. (Sunday Telegraph)

Winner of the European Union Literature Prize and having pinteresque sensibilities, Peter Terrin’s The Guard is a haunting novel of perceived oppression by the an omnipresent, but unknown, authority.
 
In the near future, Harry and Michel live in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the inhabitants. No one goes outside. The world might be at war, it might even have been plunged into nuclear winter. No one knows.
 
But one weekend, all of the residents leave the block, one by one, all but the man on floor 29. Harry and Michel stick to their posts. All they know, all they can hope for, is that if they are vigilant, “the Organization” will reward them: promotion to an elite cadre of security officers remains their shining goal. But what if there were no-one left to guard?
 
Playing on our darkest fears, The Guard is a tautly observed novel by a writer of striking and stylish originality.