Would I have been better off with a life of engineering and Allah like my cousins? I doubt they wake up with blood in their mouths, callouses in their throats, at my age . . .

What becomes of the transgressive shock artist when decades spent chasing pleasure give way to the challenges of monogamy, parenthood and - whisper it - responsibility? Bestselling author and frontman of Fat White Family, The Moonlandingz and Decius Lias Saoudi spares nothing in exposing the fears, indignities and consolations of an artist who has achieved neither vast success nor spectacular self-destruction. Painfully funny and self-laceratingly honest, Tears of the Patriarch finds Saoudi asking urgent questions of a world riven with identity politics and cultural homogenisation, all the while swerving sinkholes of despond born of a chronic attraction to problematic but gifted men. From an occult ritual on a remote Irish beach with drastic consequences to time in an Algerian jail when a promo video goes wrong, from Paris fashion week to the traumatic birth of his first child, this is a book that only he could write: outrageous, impassioned and unforgiving - of himself primarily, but also of a world he's convinced is out to get him.

Tears of the Patriarch sings the song of anyone who suspects there's no art without affliction, no family without fury and no love without tears.