A New York Times Editors' Choice

"[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post

The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London.

Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . .

And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . .

In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.

David Peace – named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 – was born and brought up in Yorkshire, England. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-four, Nineteen Seventy-seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty-three), which was adapted into a three-part BBC series; GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and The Damned Utd, which was adapted into a film starring Michael Sheen. Tokyo Year Zero, the first part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy, was published in 2007, and the second part, Occupied City, in 2009.