On December 9th, S&C Founding Editor and author Tom Sykes will be launching Tangled Saviours, an energetic, imaginative and self-aware novel of race, gender, culture, prejudice and redemption.
Extraordinary characters connect across time and space through fate, heredity and sympathetic magic. Kirk Decker is an abusive 1980s B-movie actor self-destructing from drink and drugs, and some people want him dead. While shooting an action film in the Philippines, he has unearthly visions and weird encounters.
Dayang is the dutiful queen of a matriarchal tribe in 16th-century Luzon. Why are her people suffering from mysterious diseases? How can they call on the spirit world to save them? And what connects them through time, space and magic to Kirk and other violent white men in need of redemption?
Straddling the speculative and historical fiction genres, Tangled Saviours will appeal to fans of David Mitchell, Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Neal Stephenson, Amitav Ghosh and Margaret Atwood. The award-winning British science fiction writer Adam Roberts has called the book ‘a blistering multi-strand historical novel, linking Spanish colonization of the Philippines in the 16th century, American Nazism in the mid-20th century and the sleazy world of movie-stardom in the 1980s. It is a novel about violence, trauma, about good and evil, devils and angels, but also a novel about hope and humanity: vividly rendered, superbly readable, unforgettable. Tangled Saviours say that the past is now, but that now might be different.’
Legendary Filipina novelist Ninotchka Rosca describes Tangled Saviours as ‘fast-paced, mind-bending, reality-contorted narrative of how probability waves can be warped, entangled, and set aright in the often indescribable relationship between colonizer and colonized. Be prepared for the improbable.’
The book launch will be held on Tuesday 9th December, 7pm-8.15pm at the White Swan Theatre, White Swan Rd, Portsmouth PO1 2DT. It will involve multimedia performances based on the book’s themes by Sykes, Matt Smith, Olly Gruner and Dan McCabe. The event will include a Q&A led by award-winning author and researcher Victoria Leslie. The launch is free and open to the general public.
The novel is available for pre-order here.
Picture reproduced courtesy of Roundfire Books.
