The Guard - Couverture rigide

“Terrin tells a strongly allegorical story of 21st-century society, which holds the reader under its spell . . . The Guard is not only an enthralling psychological novel, it is also a love story, one which encompasses oppressiveness, emotion and explicit sensuality.” —from the European Union Literature Prize citation
 
“Terrin’s  wonderfully  sinister, darkly funny novel owes more to this genre than to simple SF. Guards Harry and narrator Michel keep watch in a tower block basement as the ’New War’ empties the city. Many twists ensue. Finely translated (from Dutch) by David Colmer, the deadpan, exact, discomfiting prose keeps an icy grip.” —Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
 
“Webs of Pinteresque paranoia ... Effectively horrid.” — David Langford, The Sunday Telegraph
 
“A mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel.” — John O’Connell, The Guardian
 
“This is a tremendous novel, often horrifically funny and always unsettling. Most emphatically, though, it is a European novel, articulating the cultural situation of a Flanders-born writer looking to Dutch literature while retaining a powerful awareness of Belgium’s surrealist traditions.” —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
 
“A rich and gripping mix of all the ingredients that make for a truly haunting atmosphere.” — Valeria Melchioretto, Writers’ Hub
 
“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.” —Joe Royce, Starburst Magazine
 
‘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
 
“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
 
“The Guard is a sublime book . . . a brilliantly told story.” — Karin Overmars, Het Parool
 
“Terrin has enriched Flemish literature with a clever novel about modern, yet simultaneously universal, paranoia that ends in a perfect psychological pas de deux.” —De Morgen
 
“The Guard is a novel that leaves you astonished with its beauty and completeness.” —NRC Handelsblad

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.