2002 Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel (nominee)
Four young men are in a car on their way to assassinate the politician Don Rojo. Unfortunately, not one of them has assassinated anyone before, three of them are in love with the Don's daughter, and, unbeknownst to them the politician is lying awake in his Hacienda, contemplating suicide.
Goddard describes the events of one bizarre night in prose that is taut, evocative and often darkly funny. As the rain pours down on the Tibidabo road, the would-be-murderers encounter lusty barmaids, crises of conscience, road blocks and - with fatal results - the man who ordered Rojo's assassination, and all the while the Spanish civil war boils around them. Eventually they converge on the hacienda (along with a couple of real assassins, a failed Don Juan and two over-sexed daughters) in a surreal and bullet-ridden climax that puts 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' to shame.
Genre: General Fiction
Goddard describes the events of one bizarre night in prose that is taut, evocative and often darkly funny. As the rain pours down on the Tibidabo road, the would-be-murderers encounter lusty barmaids, crises of conscience, road blocks and - with fatal results - the man who ordered Rojo's assassination, and all the while the Spanish civil war boils around them. Eventually they converge on the hacienda (along with a couple of real assassins, a failed Don Juan and two over-sexed daughters) in a surreal and bullet-ridden climax that puts 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' to shame.
Genre: General Fiction
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Used availability for Tariq Goddard's Homage to a Firing Squad