Red or Dead

by David Peace, Phillip Breen (Adapted by)

Overview

'That's all I ask from anyone. That we try to make the people happy.'

Bill Shankly had one aim: to make Liverpool Football Club invincible.

As its manager from 1959, he secured the team promotion, the First Division title, the FA Cup and success in Europe. For fifteen years, he defined what it was to be a Liverpool fan, and demanded total loyalty from his players and coaches. A loyalty that Bill hoped would be repaid when he retired...

David Peace's iconic novel Red or Dead is the fictionalised story of a game, a life, and a man of two halves. This stage version was adapted and directed by Phillip Breen, and first performed at Liverpool's Royal Court in 2025, with a cast including Peter Mullan as Bill Shankly.

The novel was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and has been widely acclaimed:

'David Peace brings perfect pitch to this ode to Bill Shankly's Liverpool reign' Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Observer

'A love letter to a great manager, an elegy to the beautiful game' Independent

'So hypnotic that even the football-averse might enjoy it' Guardian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788508933
Publisher:	Hern, Nick Books
Publication date:	04/03/2025
Series:	NHB Modern Plays
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Phillip Breen is a writer and director who was born and grew up in Liverpool. David Peace is a novelist whose work includes the Red Riding Quartet, The Damned Utd and Red or Dead.

David Peace is an acclaimed novelist, best known for his Red Riding Quartet (1999–2002), GB84 (2004), The Damned Utd (2006) and Red or Dead (2013).

Phillip Breen is a theatre director whose work encompasses opera, theatre, comedy, musicals, jazz cabaret, large-scale community theatre projects, new work and classics. 

As a writer, he has written adaptations of Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence, Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell and Red or Dead by David Peace.

Editorial Reviews

I’d offer the British P.M. Red or Dead, David Peace’s demented novel about real-life soccer coach Bill Shankly... The novel is barking mad, but quite brilliant, and is a monument to a kind of magnificent decency once at the core of British life, but now rapidly fading."
—Kazuo ishiguro, New York Times Book Review

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

“As both postmodern epic and ultimate sports novel, Red or Dead is a winner.” 
—Washington Post

“Red or Dead is hypnotic, the words casting a spell that verges on the shamanistic….[it] creates the most remarkable, operatic sweeps of emotion in the reader... This is the stuff of great literature.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Sprawling, ambitious and heartbreaking, it's one of the best sports novels in recent years."
—NPR, Best Books of 2014

10 Best Books of 2014
—Janet Potter, NPR's On Point

One of Liberty Hardy's (RiverRun Bookstore) Must-Read Books from Indie Presses for 2014 on Book Riot

“It’s about so much more than soccer. It’s about politics, obsession, community—plus, what could be more British than football?”
—Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Books to Inspire Your Next Trip to the United Kingdom

“Red or Dead might be seen as an elegy for that period when the game was played by and for the working classes and perhaps even seemed an authentic expression of their collectivist sensibility... In writing an elegy for Bill Shankly’s world, then, Peace suggests that what has been lost goes far beyond sports. Or to put it another way, he shows us ourselves in soccer."
—The Millions

“David Peace’s writing reverberates in your head, pulling you along headfirst into the story... Red or Dead is a feat of writing. The manner in which Peace shares this history with us is just as important as the story itself. It’s not often that writing can transport you through style. Peace more than just succeeds in this. He excels."
—Preeti Chhibber, Book Riot's Books of the Year

“Truly brave and utterly heroic . . . I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Red or Dead before. Not ever.”
—The Goldsmiths Prize shortlist citation

“I want to go out and knock on doors like a Jehovah’s Witness and read this book to people.”
—The Observer

“A magnificent literary achievement . . . Profoundly powerful.”
—Booklist

“An epic that has more in common with Beowulf or The Iliad than with the conventional sports novel.”
—The Times of London

“The writing is honed, sculpted, poetic . . . It doesn’t matter if you don’t follow the game, this is also a profound investigation of the tension between aspiration and the constraints of time, the very essence of the human condition.”
—Metro

“A book about the choices by which we live and die, the moments that make us feel alive, and those that choke our souls. It is a masterpiece. Make no mistake of that. A masterpiece.”
—The Quietus

“An extraordinary piece of writing.”
—The Independent

“A story of triumph . . . one that might be quoted for decades.”
—Kirkus

“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.”
-Book Riot's 100 Must Read Indie Press Books

From the Publisher