Unholy Land

Lavie Tidhar does it again. A jewelled little box of miracles. Magnificent.
--Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine

Extraordinary, confronting, intriguing. Unholy Land is a dream of a home that's never existed, but is no less real for that: a dream that smells like blood and gunpowder. It's precisely what we've come to expect of Tidhar, a writer who just keeps getting better.
--Angela Slatter, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning The Bitterwood Bible

There are SFF writers. There are good SFF writers. And there is Lavie Tidhar. In a genre entirely of his own, and quite possibly a warped genius, he rummages in the ruins of our centuries and our genres and makes out of them something strange, dark and utterly unique. There is no one like him writing in genre today. This [Unholy Land] is a twisted piece of alt-history/geography that refuses to go where lesser writers would drive it. Bold and witty and smoky, it plays games and coquetries, makes dark dalliances and will leave you dazzled and delighted.
--Ian McDonald, author of Time Was and Luna: Wolf Moon

Lavie takes us through a haunting, mesmerizing Judea, across multiple timelines into the promised night shelter in British East Africa. Here is an expedition at once proposed and taken, an alternate reality in which the holocaust is averted but the mechanics of displacement remain the same, where people are oppressed and oppressor at the same time. A genius, dreamlike fantasy for those who slip across might-have-been worlds.
--Saad Z. Hossain, author of Escape from Baghdad!

Unholy Land is a stunning achievement. It is packed to the brim with engaging ideas and features a captivating story . . . beautiful and thought-provoking.
--The Speculative Shelf

By combining spatiotemporal mind games reminiscent of Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts with a cosmopolitan wit evocative of Graham Greene's screenplay for The Third Man, Lavie Tidhar has given us a mystically charged, morally complex vision of Theodor Herzl's famous Jewish state that might have been.
--James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Lavie Tidhar's daring Unholy Land brilliantly showcases one of the foremost science fiction authors of our generation.
-- Silvia Moreno-Garcia, World Fantasy Award-winning editor and author of Certain Dark Things

Unholy Land is probably better than Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union.
--Bradley Horner, author of the Darkside Earther series

Praise for the Campbell Award-winning novel Central Station

An NPR Best Book of 2016
An Amazon Featured Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book
A Tor.com Best Book of 2016
A Guardian Best SF & Fantasy Book of 2016
A Publishers Weekly Staff Pick
A Kirkus Best Science Fiction and Fantasy pick
British Science Fiction Award, shortlist
Arthur C. Clarke Award, shortlist

It is just this side of a masterpiece -- short, restrained, lush -- and the truest joy of it is in the way Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.
--NPR Books

[STARRED REVIEW] World Fantasy Award-winner Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming) magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel set under the towering titular spaceport. In a future border town formed between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa, cyborg ex-soldiers deliver illicit drugs for psychic vampires, and robot priests give sermons and conduct circumcisions. The Chong family struggles to save patriarch Vlad, lost in the inescapable memory stream they all share, thanks to his father's hack of the Conversation, the collective unconscious. New children, born from back-alley genetic engineering, begin to experience actual and virtual reality simultaneously. Family and faith bring them all back and sustain them. Tidhar gleefully mixes classic SF concepts with prose styles and concepts that recall the best of world literature. The byways of Central Station ring with dusty life, like the bruising, bustling Cairo streets depicted by Naguib Mahfouz. Characters wrestle with problems of identity forged under systems of oppression, much as displaced Easterners and Westerners do in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. And yet this is unmistakably SF. Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.
--Publishers Weekly

[STARRED REVIEW] . . . a fascinating future glimpsed through the lens of a tight-knit community. Verdict: Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming; The Violent Century) changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.
--Library Journal, starred review

A marvellous, multi-faceted story that flows gently from one character to another like an intimate private tour of Tel Aviv and the spaceport at its centre.
--SF Crowsnest

Thought-provoking . . . highly intellectual.
--Booklist

A sprawling hymn to the glory and mess of cultural diversity.
--Guardian

Quietly enthralling and subtly ingenious.
--Asimov's Science Fiction

Beautiful, original, a shimmering tapestry of connections and images - I can't think of another SF novel quite like it. Lavie Tidhar is one of the most distinctive voices to enter the field in many years.
--Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series

If you want to know what SF is going to look like in the next decade, this is it.
--Gardner Dozois, editor of the bestselling Year's Best Science Fiction series

A dazzling tale of complicated politics and even more complicated souls. Beautiful.
--Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings

If Nalo Hopkinson and William Gibson held a s ance to channel the spirit of Ray Bradbury, they might be inspired to produce a work as grimy, as gorgeous, and as downright sensual as Central Station.
--Peter Watts, author of Blindsight

Central Station is masterful: simultaneously spare and sweeping--a perfect combination of emotional sophistication and speculative vision. Tidhar always stuns me.
--Kij Johnson, author of At the Mouth of the River of Bees

A unique marriage of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, China Mi ville, and Larry Niven with 50 degrees of compassion and the bizarre added. An irresistible cocktail.
--Maxim Jakubowski, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Vina Jackson novels

Tidhar weaves strands of faith and science fiction into a breathtaking and lush family history of the far future.
--Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead A mosaic of mind-blowing ideas and a dazzling look at a richly-imagined, textured future.
--Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings

Central Station is brilliant.
--Barnes and Noble

[Tidhar] has created a textured and original future that echoes real historical and economic tensions while satisfying veteran readers with deliberate echoes of classic science fiction...Deeply humane.
--Chicago Tribune