Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English
Categories
Fantasy

UNHOLY LAND

Lavie Tidhar

Haunted by nebulous loss, author Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland:
Palestina, a Jewish state established in East Africa at the early years of the 20th century.

But the land has changed in Tirosh's absence. A vast new wall is being built
across the border as terrorist attacks rock the capital, Ararat; and as soon as
Tirosh arrives, an old friend is murdered in his hotel room, where he had been trying to deliver a warning.

Tirosh's quest to find his missing niece, Deborah, leads him on a collision
course with two other outsiders: Bloom, a ruthless member of the state's security apparatus, and Nur, a Middle Eastern woman who is more than she seems. For there is more than one Palestina, and the borders between the worlds are beginning to break.

To stop the deaths, Tirosh would have to confront his own history - if only he could survive long enough. For Palestina is a land which devours its people...

Available products
Book Published 2018-10-01 by Tachyon Publications

Comments

Recalling China Miéville's The City and the City, Tidhar's narrative resonates with the dilemmas of modern Israel without devolving to mere metaphor. (Best Books of 2018)

Unholy Land is a stunning achievement. (SpikeGelato) Read more...

This is really quite terrific. The story of the missing woman is intriguing, a proper detective novel plot, while the reality-shifting elements play an important role and reach an astonishing apotheosis towards the end in a sequence that puts Lovecraft to shame. It's another Lavie Tidhar book that is full of ideas and unafraid to tackle big, controversial, important issues. Warren Ellis compares him to Michael Moorcock in an afterword, and like Moorcock, Tidhar writes books that are unpredictable and experimental, consistently and reliably surprising, yet always readable and engaging. UNHOLY LAND is another corker. Read more...

It's the kind of smart, intertextual science fiction that would make Philip K. Dick giddy. (Best Books of 2018)

Here, in UNHOLY LAND, he turns his attention to his own homeland, in a scenario that seems wildly unlikely until we realize it was actually proposed in the early 20th century: namely, relocating European Jews to part of what is now Uganda. When pulp writer Tirosh returns to his home in Palestina, he learns that his niece has disappeared while researching the early history of the country. While this mystery provides the spine of the plot, we also meet an ominous investigator following Tirosh for his own reasons and a historian working for a shadowy Border Agency, whose job is to monitor various timelines. By the time their stories all braid together, Tidhar has turned a suspenseful adventure tale into a complex meditation on the possible paths of modern Jewish history.