“Tidhar fearlessly crests the wave of the New New-Weird with a wild, decadent hybrid of The Dark Tower and Carnivale.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, author of Deathless
In this dazzling new novel evoking Westerns, surrealism, epic fantasy, mythology, and circus extravaganzas, Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) has created an evocative dreamscape. With dark comedy, heartbreak, hope, and adventure, The Escapement offers the archetypal darkness of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger within the dark whimsy of a child’s imagination.
ISBN: Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-327-9; Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-328-6
Published: September 2021
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital Books
2022 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation, Best Novel
In this dazzling new novel evoking Westerns, surrealism, epic fantasy, mythology, and circus extravaganzas, World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) has created an incomparable dreamscape of dark comedy, heartbreak, hope, and adventure. Chronicling a lone man’s quest in parallel worlds, The Escapement offers the archetypal darkness of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger within the dark whimsy of a child’s imagination.
“Comic, tragic, and utterly magnificent.” —Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
“Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.” —NPR Books
Into the Escapement rides the Stranger, a lone gunman on a quest to rescue his son in a strange parallel reality. But it is easy to lose one’s way on an endlessly shifting, unpredictable landscape. Especially in a place full of dangerous mirror-images of a child’s beloved things: lawless heroes, giants made of stone, downtrodden clowns, spectacular symbol storms, and an endless war between gods and shadowy beings.
As the Stranger has learned, the Escapement is a dreamscape of deep mysteries, unlikely allies, and unwinnable battles. Yet the flower the he seeks still lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness. Time is running out as the Stranger journeys deeper into the secret heart of an unimaginable world.
In his most compelling work to date, Lavie Tidhar has delivered a multicolored tapestry of dazzling imagery. The Escapement is an epic, wildly original chronicle of the extraordinary lengths to which one will go for love.
2022 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation, Best Novel 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List Publishers Weekly Top-10 Forthcoming Fantasy Title LitStack Most Anticipated Book Den of Geek Top New Fantasy Book Foreword Book of the Day
“To say The Escapement is unique sells it way short. It’s part weird western and part quest; half dream and half epic adventure tale set in a memorable Daliesque landscape. Tidhar lets his imagination run wild in this vivid book, all told in spare, beautiful prose.”
—Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series
“A father wrangles with his impending grief in a steampunk, Wild West alternate universe in Lavie Tidhar’s dazzling novel The Escapement . . . Those who enter the Escapement should strap themselves in for horrors and wonders galore. Filled with contorted fairy tales, myths, and familiar stories, Lavie Tidhar’s latest novel is both a fantastical diversion and a moving articulation of deep parental love.”
—Foreword
“Lavie Tidhar is a voice to be reckoned with. With The Escapement, he fearlessly crests the wave of the New New Weird with a wild, decadent hybrid of The Dark Tower and Carnivale. A vivid beach read, if the beach was made of greasepaint and gunpowder.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, author of Deathless
“Comic, tragic, and utterly magnificent—a masterpiece of fantasy. Lavie Tidhar has crafted a wonderfully strange and surreal world in The Escapement, setting a liminal stage for both a gripping adventure and a poignant meditation on grief. I can’t wait to read it again.”
—Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
“The Escapement is like nothing else you’ve read. I’d recommend it entirely on that basis, but it’s also beautifully written, thoughtful and deep, and resonant for anyone who’s been a parent, or a child.”
—Andrew Wheeler, Antic Musings
“Lavie Tidhar’s The Escapement (2021) is a fantastic and fantastical fever dream of a novel, a Weird Western via Lewis Carroll . . . Defying genre, defying categorization, even perhaps defying plot, Tidhar has crafted a baroque hallucinatory tale. you have to let wash over you as much as you read it.”
—Fantasy Literature
“Can we just all admit now that Lavie Tidhar’s a genius? He’s written another brilliant book—a beautiful fever dream that somehow manages to be laugh-out-loud funny, psychedelically weird, and deeply moving.”
—Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Spoonbenders
“These shifts of consciousness between worlds and the drawing of themes and symbols from one reality into another remind me of Iain Banks’ The Bridge. But The Escapement is an original masterpiece that is all Tidhar, full of echoes of his earlier stories and novels.”
—Sci Fi Mind
“Tidhar is a spellbinding stylist with a spell-casting imagination. Part fantasy, part sci-fi, part surreal mainstream, this novel plonks the reader into a vast, surreal landscape, the Escapement, in which clowns and stone monsters and cowboys and classic fictional characters coexist in a shifting tableau. The Stranger is our hero, a warrior searching for mythical flowers, even as in another universe he sits at his sick boy’s side in a hospital. None of this should work but all of it does, the author managing to evoke sadness, awe, and even humor. I could only compare my reading to old Philip K. Dick married to Samuel R. Delaney. The Escapement is a captivating triumph of imagination.”
—Watch
“Somewhere, in some city, a nameless man attends his dying son’s bedside, powerless to save the boy. Desperate to find a cure, he slips into the Escapement: a Western world of maniacal whimsy populated by bounty hunters, stone giants, mimes, and clowns. Here, the ghost of John Wayne Gacy becomes a bloodthirsty giant, and P.T. Barnum is recast as a clown-enslaving general. The man, known in the Escapement as the Stranger, is not alone; most of the people in this weird desert come there from the real world by way of dream, drink, or death. Studded with features like the Big Rock Candy Mountains and the Desert de Soleil, the land bears intimate connections to the dying boy in the hospital bed—a boy who loves the circus and its clowns—and it’s here that the Stranger hopes to find his son a panacea: Ur-shanabi, the Plant of Heartbeat. In keeping with its roots in midcentury Westerns, Tidhar’s novel casts the Escapement’s clowns as Native American analogs, turning the Stranger into their White savior and avenger, a man who knows that ‘one should never be unkind to clowns.’ The author draws from an eclectic mix of sources to create a dazzling story that is more than the sum of its parts, and much of the fun of reading it comes from recognizing its homages. Knowledgeable readers will notice shades of Stephen King, Lewis Carroll, and Westworld here, and Tidhar himself cites Z. Ariel’s fairy tale, “The Heart of the Golden Flower,” the Epic of Gilgamesh, Salvador Dalí, tarot cards, and Sergio Leone as particular sources of inspiration. A delightfully cacophonous novel, teeming with character.”
—Kirkus
“The Escapement is absorbing, bizarre, haunting, and compelling. Lavie Tidhar continues to shatter the boundaries of literary and genre fiction with a novel that is equal parts horrifying dreamscape and an affecting meditation on parental love. There are a lot of books out there, but this is an experience.”
—David Liss, author of The Peculiarities
“Furiously inventive and wildly eclectic . . . Among the most visual and even cinematic of Tidhar’s novels (Chaplin and Fellini come to mind, as well as Leone and maybe even Jodorowski), it’s also, in the end, a surprisingly touching reminder of how such quests can begin in heartbreak.”
—Gary K Wolfe, Locus
“Tidhar has done a brilliant job not just of weaving together a wide variety of myths and stories to build the world of the Escapement, but also layering dream and reality so successfully that it was truly impossible to tell which was which.”
—Rebecca Glazer, author of My Throat is an Open Grave
“This was the weirdest book I think have ever read, and I loved every minute of it.”
—Into the Heart Wyld
“5/5 stars. The descriptions are amazing throughout and the clown world is incredibly creative and imaginative. I loved some of the imagery here and never knew what surprise I would find on the next page.”
—Hidden in Pages
“Yes, there’s a narrative thread to follow throughout the book, but it’s only here in order for Tidhar to masterfully weave all sorts of different things together that make the reader’s brain explode, or at the very least make readers shake their heads in bewilderment, but, ultimately, wonderment.”
—Mt Void
“[The Escapement] feels like a surrealist cartoon co-written by Dr. Seuss and Ray Bradbury.”
—Forward
“If you’re a fan of bizarre fantasy world, absurdist stories or even magical realism, I think this book is perfect for you . . . The writing is very fluid, beautiful and fever dream-like.”
—The Ink Slinger
“Surreal, twisted and unusual but also incredibly intriguing. I think this is one of those books you would get more out of on every read. It’s almost begging to be read more than once. And at its very core, I can’t help but get Dark Tower vibes from this book. I really enjoyed it!”
—Of Worlds Forgotten
Lavie Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming, Unholy Land) is an acclaimed author of literature, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, and middle grade fiction. Tidhar received the Campbell and Neukom Literary awards for the novel Central Station, which has been translated into more than ten languages. He has also received the British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. He is a book columnist for the Washington Post, and recently edited the Best of World Science Fiction anthology. Tidhar has lived all over the world, including Israel, Vanuatu, Laos, and South Africa. He currently resides with his family in London.
Praise for The Violent Century
“A brilliantly etched phantasmagoric reconfiguring of that most sizzling of eras—the twilight 20th.”
—James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential and Blood’s a Rover
“The Violent Century is a brilliant story of superheroes and spies and secret histories. It stands with Alan Moore’s Watchmen as an examination of the myths that we made in the 20th Century and the ways they still haunt us now. it’s as dramatic and vital as the best comic books and as beautifully written and evocative as any literary novel today. Read it. You’ll see.”
—Christopher Farnsworth, author of Blood Oath and Flashmob
“Like Watchmen on crack.”
—io9
“If Nietzche had written an X-Men storyline whilst high on mescaline, it might have read something like The Violent Century.”
—Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass
“An alternative history tour-de-force. Epic, intense and authentic. Lavie Tidhar reboots the 20th century with spies and superheroes battling for mastery—and the results are electric.”
—Tom Harper, author of The Lost Temple
“A stunning masterpiece”
—TheIndependent
“Tidhar synthesises the geeky and the political in a vision of world events that breaks new superhero ground.”
—The Guardian
“It’s hard, but not impossible as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey and others have shown, to create a morally complex, artistically ambitious story based on characters whose origins are not that far removed from the simplicity of Superman, Spiderman, and their ilk. Tidhar has succeeded brilliantly in this task.”
—LA Review of Books
“A sophisticated, moving and gripping take on 20th century conflicts and our capacity for love and hate, honour and betrayal.”
—The Daily Mail
“It’s the X-Men as written by John le Carré . . . A love story and meditation on heroism, this is an elegiac espionage adventure that demands a second reading.”
—Metro
“Could keep anyone, regardless of the types of stories they regularly enjoy, interested and engaged. Tidhar has created a book that oozes excellence in both characterisation and storytelling.”
—The Huffington Post
“A new masterpiece . . . a tremendous, unforgettable read.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“A terrifically told tale of heroism and enduring friendship that captures our imaginations from the very first page.”
—Booklist
“If you love Philip K. Dick, Lavie Tidhar should be your new favorite writer . . . an unforgettable read.”
—The Jewish Standard
“He’s dealing with the grandest schemes on the largest of backdrops in time and place, and this level of awe-inspiring craft places him firmly within the highest tier of writers working today, no longer an emerging writer, but a master.”
—British Fantasy Society
“Intense and evocative”
—SFX
“Wonderfully drawn . . . gripping, imaginative and moving”
—Sci Fi Now
“The sort of thing Quentin Tarantino did as bloody wish-fulfillment in Inglourious Basterds, multiplied by several orders of magnitude.”
—Locus
“This is a novel that can break your heart and then, ever so subtly, include a cameo by Stan Lee. Tidhar clearly knows as much about supermen of all kinds as he does about the circumstances that produce them.”
—Strange Horizons
“At the last, Lavie Tidhar’s latest is at once a love story, a tragedy, a spy novel, a memoir of a friendship, an exposé of the horrors of war, and a very serious study of the superhero: the origins of the concept as well as its relative relevance. The Violent Century is a difficult text, yes, but one that gives as good as it gets.”
—Tor.com
“The Violent Century is an excellent novel that demonstrates, once again, the impressive versatility of its author.”
—Interzone
“A masterful example of alternate universe science fiction and can only add to its author’s rapidly growing reputation.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“An original, engrossing fusion of noir-ish super-heroes and gritty espionage thriller . . . a fantastic novel”
—Civilian Reader
“Tidhar has the chance to become this generation’s Ursula LeGuin, an author who is equally capable of engaging readers on a surfeit of levels, as socially conscious as he is literary, and as reckless as he is in control. The Violent Century is unquestionably one of the finest novels of 2013. Lavie Tidhar is no longer a rising star in the genre, but one burning bright.”
—Staffer’s Book Review
“A powerful novel, which will no doubt reward rereading.”
—Sci Fi Bulletin
“Tidhar brings everything to a stunning and satisfying conclusion. This book had me hooked from the beginning.”
—A Bookish Type
Praise for Unholy Land
“Lavie Tidhar does it again. A jewelled little box of miracles. Magnificent.”
—Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine
“[STARRED REVIEW] World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Central Station) will leave readers’ heads spinning with this disorienting and gripping alternate history. Author Lior Tirosh, grieving a personal tragedy, travels home after years abroad and immediately has a series of strange encounters that pull him into a complex plot to destroy the border between worlds. He arrives in Palestina, the land that the Jews were offered on the Ugandan border in 1904, which both closely resembles and is profoundly different from the Israel of our world, and is followed by two government agents who are trying to stop the destruction of ‘borders,’ though it’s unclear whose side they are really on. Tirosh discovers a niece he had forgotten, is accused of murder, narrowly dodges threats to his life, and takes on the role of a detective from one of his own novels as he tries to understand what is endangered and by whom. ‘No matter what we do, human history always attempts to repeat itself,’ Tidhar writes, even as he explores the substantial differences in history that might arise from single but significant choices. Readers of all kinds, and particularly fans of detective stories and puzzles, will enjoy grappling with the numerous questions raised by this stellar work.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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 Hussian, 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
Praise for Central Station
2017 John W. Campbell Award winner
2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award winner
2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, Best novel
2016 British Science Fiction Award longlist, Best novel
2017 British Science Fiction Award winner, Best artwork
2017 Geffen Award, Best Translated Science Fiction Book nominee
An NPR Best Book of 2016
A Tor.com Best Book of 2016
An Amazon Featured Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book
A Kirkus 2016 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy pick
A Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016
A UK Guardian Best SF & Fantasy Book of 2016
[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 . . . 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 “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
“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 best-selling Year’s Best Science Fiction series
“A dazzling tale of complicated politics and even more complicated souls. Beautiful.”
—Ken Liu, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy winner and author of The Grace of Kings
“If Nalo Hopkinson and William Gibson held a séance 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
“Central Station boasts complexity without complication, sharp prose, and a multi-dimensional world.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass
“A unique marriage of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, China Miéville, 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
“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
“I recommend it highly. It’ll stay with you for days, because every idea in it has more ideas under it. It’s all of science fiction distilled into a single book.”
—Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Gun Machine
“Sublimely sensual, emotionally moreish, and composed with crystalline clarity irrespective of its incredible complexity.”
—Tor.com
“Brimming with sensory detail and paying tribute to a plethora of science-fiction tropes, there are few works to rival Central Station.”
—Intergalactic Medicine Show
“Amidst the loves and the fears, Tidhar reminds us of the intoxicating and invigorating power of longing and nostalgia.”
—The Jewish Standard
Praise for the World Fantasy Award-winner, Osama
“Bears comparison with the best of Philip K. Dick”
—The Financial Times
“Exceptional”
—World Literature Today
Praise for The Violent Century
“A tour de force”
—James Ellroy, bestselling author of L.A. Confidential
The Escapement
Lavie Tidhar
“Tidhar fearlessly crests the wave of the New New-Weird with a wild, decadent hybrid of The Dark Tower and Carnivale.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, author of Deathless
In this dazzling new novel evoking Westerns, surrealism, epic fantasy, mythology, and circus extravaganzas, Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) has created an evocative dreamscape. With dark comedy, heartbreak, hope, and adventure, The Escapement offers the archetypal darkness of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger within the dark whimsy of a child’s imagination.
The Escapement
by Lavie Tidhar
ISBN: Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-327-9; Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-328-6
Published: September 2021
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital Books
2022 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation, Best Novel
In this dazzling new novel evoking Westerns, surrealism, epic fantasy, mythology, and circus extravaganzas, World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) has created an incomparable dreamscape of dark comedy, heartbreak, hope, and adventure. Chronicling a lone man’s quest in parallel worlds, The Escapement offers the archetypal darkness of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger within the dark whimsy of a child’s imagination.
“Comic, tragic, and utterly magnificent.”
—Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
“Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.”
—NPR Books
Into the Escapement rides the Stranger, a lone gunman on a quest to rescue his son in a strange parallel reality. But it is easy to lose one’s way on an endlessly shifting, unpredictable landscape. Especially in a place full of dangerous mirror-images of a child’s beloved things: lawless heroes, giants made of stone, downtrodden clowns, spectacular symbol storms, and an endless war between gods and shadowy beings.
As the Stranger has learned, the Escapement is a dreamscape of deep mysteries, unlikely allies, and unwinnable battles. Yet the flower the he seeks still lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness. Time is running out as the Stranger journeys deeper into the secret heart of an unimaginable world.
In his most compelling work to date, Lavie Tidhar has delivered a multicolored tapestry of dazzling imagery. The Escapement is an epic, wildly original chronicle of the extraordinary lengths to which one will go for love.
2022 Philip K. Dick Award Special Citation, Best Novel
2021 Locus Recommended Reading List
Publishers Weekly Top-10 Forthcoming Fantasy Title
LitStack Most Anticipated Book
Den of Geek Top New Fantasy Book
Foreword Book of the Day
“To say The Escapement is unique sells it way short. It’s part weird western and part quest; half dream and half epic adventure tale set in a memorable Daliesque landscape. Tidhar lets his imagination run wild in this vivid book, all told in spare, beautiful prose.”
—Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series
“A father wrangles with his impending grief in a steampunk, Wild West alternate universe in Lavie Tidhar’s dazzling novel The Escapement . . . Those who enter the Escapement should strap themselves in for horrors and wonders galore. Filled with contorted fairy tales, myths, and familiar stories, Lavie Tidhar’s latest novel is both a fantastical diversion and a moving articulation of deep parental love.”
—Foreword
“Lavie Tidhar is a voice to be reckoned with. With The Escapement, he fearlessly crests the wave of the New New Weird with a wild, decadent hybrid of The Dark Tower and Carnivale. A vivid beach read, if the beach was made of greasepaint and gunpowder.”
—Catherynne M. Valente, author of Deathless
“Comic, tragic, and utterly magnificent—a masterpiece of fantasy. Lavie Tidhar has crafted a wonderfully strange and surreal world in The Escapement, setting a liminal stage for both a gripping adventure and a poignant meditation on grief. I can’t wait to read it again.”
—Samantha Shannon, author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
“The Escapement is like nothing else you’ve read. I’d recommend it entirely on that basis, but it’s also beautifully written, thoughtful and deep, and resonant for anyone who’s been a parent, or a child.”
—Andrew Wheeler, Antic Musings
“Lavie Tidhar’s The Escapement (2021) is a fantastic and fantastical fever dream of a novel, a Weird Western via Lewis Carroll . . . Defying genre, defying categorization, even perhaps defying plot, Tidhar has crafted a baroque hallucinatory tale. you have to let wash over you as much as you read it.”
—Fantasy Literature
“Can we just all admit now that Lavie Tidhar’s a genius? He’s written another brilliant book—a beautiful fever dream that somehow manages to be laugh-out-loud funny, psychedelically weird, and deeply moving.”
—Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Spoonbenders
“These shifts of consciousness between worlds and the drawing of themes and symbols from one reality into another remind me of Iain Banks’ The Bridge. But The Escapement is an original masterpiece that is all Tidhar, full of echoes of his earlier stories and novels.”
—Sci Fi Mind
“Tidhar is a spellbinding stylist with a spell-casting imagination. Part fantasy, part sci-fi, part surreal mainstream, this novel plonks the reader into a vast, surreal landscape, the Escapement, in which clowns and stone monsters and cowboys and classic fictional characters coexist in a shifting tableau. The Stranger is our hero, a warrior searching for mythical flowers, even as in another universe he sits at his sick boy’s side in a hospital. None of this should work but all of it does, the author managing to evoke sadness, awe, and even humor. I could only compare my reading to old Philip K. Dick married to Samuel R. Delaney. The Escapement is a captivating triumph of imagination.”
—Watch
“Somewhere, in some city, a nameless man attends his dying son’s bedside, powerless to save the boy. Desperate to find a cure, he slips into the Escapement: a Western world of maniacal whimsy populated by bounty hunters, stone giants, mimes, and clowns. Here, the ghost of John Wayne Gacy becomes a bloodthirsty giant, and P.T. Barnum is recast as a clown-enslaving general. The man, known in the Escapement as the Stranger, is not alone; most of the people in this weird desert come there from the real world by way of dream, drink, or death. Studded with features like the Big Rock Candy Mountains and the Desert de Soleil, the land bears intimate connections to the dying boy in the hospital bed—a boy who loves the circus and its clowns—and it’s here that the Stranger hopes to find his son a panacea: Ur-shanabi, the Plant of Heartbeat. In keeping with its roots in midcentury Westerns, Tidhar’s novel casts the Escapement’s clowns as Native American analogs, turning the Stranger into their White savior and avenger, a man who knows that ‘one should never be unkind to clowns.’ The author draws from an eclectic mix of sources to create a dazzling story that is more than the sum of its parts, and much of the fun of reading it comes from recognizing its homages. Knowledgeable readers will notice shades of Stephen King, Lewis Carroll, and Westworld here, and Tidhar himself cites Z. Ariel’s fairy tale, “The Heart of the Golden Flower,” the Epic of Gilgamesh, Salvador Dalí, tarot cards, and Sergio Leone as particular sources of inspiration. A delightfully cacophonous novel, teeming with character.”
—Kirkus
“The Escapement is absorbing, bizarre, haunting, and compelling. Lavie Tidhar continues to shatter the boundaries of literary and genre fiction with a novel that is equal parts horrifying dreamscape and an affecting meditation on parental love. There are a lot of books out there, but this is an experience.”
—David Liss, author of The Peculiarities
“Furiously inventive and wildly eclectic . . . Among the most visual and even cinematic of Tidhar’s novels (Chaplin and Fellini come to mind, as well as Leone and maybe even Jodorowski), it’s also, in the end, a surprisingly touching reminder of how such quests can begin in heartbreak.”
—Gary K Wolfe, Locus
“Tidhar has done a brilliant job not just of weaving together a wide variety of myths and stories to build the world of the Escapement, but also layering dream and reality so successfully that it was truly impossible to tell which was which.”
—Rebecca Glazer, author of My Throat is an Open Grave
“This was the weirdest book I think have ever read, and I loved every minute of it.”
—Into the Heart Wyld
“5/5 stars. The descriptions are amazing throughout and the clown world is incredibly creative and imaginative. I loved some of the imagery here and never knew what surprise I would find on the next page.”
—Hidden in Pages
“Yes, there’s a narrative thread to follow throughout the book, but it’s only here in order for Tidhar to masterfully weave all sorts of different things together that make the reader’s brain explode, or at the very least make readers shake their heads in bewilderment, but, ultimately, wonderment.”
—Mt Void
“[The Escapement] feels like a surrealist cartoon co-written by Dr. Seuss and Ray Bradbury.”
—Forward
“If you’re a fan of bizarre fantasy world, absurdist stories or even magical realism, I think this book is perfect for you . . . The writing is very fluid, beautiful and fever dream-like.”
—The Ink Slinger
“Surreal, twisted and unusual but also incredibly intriguing. I think this is one of those books you would get more out of on every read. It’s almost begging to be read more than once. And at its very core, I can’t help but get Dark Tower vibes from this book. I really enjoyed it!”
—Of Worlds Forgotten
Lavie Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming, Unholy Land) is an acclaimed author of literature, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, and middle grade fiction. Tidhar received the Campbell and Neukom Literary awards for the novel Central Station, which has been translated into more than ten languages. He has also received the British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. He is a book columnist for the Washington Post, and recently edited the Best of World Science Fiction anthology. Tidhar has lived all over the world, including Israel, Vanuatu, Laos, and South Africa. He currently resides with his family in London.
Praise for The Violent Century
“A brilliantly etched phantasmagoric reconfiguring of that most sizzling of eras—the twilight 20th.”
—James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential and Blood’s a Rover
“The Violent Century is a brilliant story of superheroes and spies and secret histories. It stands with Alan Moore’s Watchmen as an examination of the myths that we made in the 20th Century and the ways they still haunt us now. it’s as dramatic and vital as the best comic books and as beautifully written and evocative as any literary novel today. Read it. You’ll see.”
—Christopher Farnsworth, author of Blood Oath and Flashmob
“Like Watchmen on crack.”
—io9
“If Nietzche had written an X-Men storyline whilst high on mescaline, it might have read something like The Violent Century.”
—Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass
“An alternative history tour-de-force. Epic, intense and authentic. Lavie Tidhar reboots the 20th century with spies and superheroes battling for mastery—and the results are electric.”
—Tom Harper, author of The Lost Temple
“A stunning masterpiece”
—The Independent
“Tidhar synthesises the geeky and the political in a vision of world events that breaks new superhero ground.”
—The Guardian
“It’s hard, but not impossible as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey and others have shown, to create a morally complex, artistically ambitious story based on characters whose origins are not that far removed from the simplicity of Superman, Spiderman, and their ilk. Tidhar has succeeded brilliantly in this task.”
—LA Review of Books
“A sophisticated, moving and gripping take on 20th century conflicts and our capacity for love and hate, honour and betrayal.”
—The Daily Mail
“It’s the X-Men as written by John le Carré . . . A love story and meditation on heroism, this is an elegiac espionage adventure that demands a second reading.”
—Metro
“Could keep anyone, regardless of the types of stories they regularly enjoy, interested and engaged. Tidhar has created a book that oozes excellence in both characterisation and storytelling.”
—The Huffington Post
“A new masterpiece . . . a tremendous, unforgettable read.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“A terrifically told tale of heroism and enduring friendship that captures our imaginations from the very first page.”
—Booklist
“If you love Philip K. Dick, Lavie Tidhar should be your new favorite writer . . . an unforgettable read.”
—The Jewish Standard
“He’s dealing with the grandest schemes on the largest of backdrops in time and place, and this level of awe-inspiring craft places him firmly within the highest tier of writers working today, no longer an emerging writer, but a master.”
—British Fantasy Society
“Intense and evocative”
—SFX
“Wonderfully drawn . . . gripping, imaginative and moving”
—Sci Fi Now
“The sort of thing Quentin Tarantino did as bloody wish-fulfillment in Inglourious Basterds, multiplied by several orders of magnitude.”
—Locus
“This is a novel that can break your heart and then, ever so subtly, include a cameo by Stan Lee. Tidhar clearly knows as much about supermen of all kinds as he does about the circumstances that produce them.”
—Strange Horizons
“At the last, Lavie Tidhar’s latest is at once a love story, a tragedy, a spy novel, a memoir of a friendship, an exposé of the horrors of war, and a very serious study of the superhero: the origins of the concept as well as its relative relevance. The Violent Century is a difficult text, yes, but one that gives as good as it gets.”
—Tor.com
“The Violent Century is an excellent novel that demonstrates, once again, the impressive versatility of its author.”
—Interzone
“A masterful example of alternate universe science fiction and can only add to its author’s rapidly growing reputation.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“An original, engrossing fusion of noir-ish super-heroes and gritty espionage thriller . . . a fantastic novel”
—Civilian Reader
“Tidhar has the chance to become this generation’s Ursula LeGuin, an author who is equally capable of engaging readers on a surfeit of levels, as socially conscious as he is literary, and as reckless as he is in control. The Violent Century is unquestionably one of the finest novels of 2013. Lavie Tidhar is no longer a rising star in the genre, but one burning bright.”
—Staffer’s Book Review
“A powerful novel, which will no doubt reward rereading.”
—Sci Fi Bulletin
“Tidhar brings everything to a stunning and satisfying conclusion. This book had me hooked from the beginning.”
—A Bookish Type
Praise for Unholy Land
“Lavie Tidhar does it again. A jewelled little box of miracles. Magnificent.”
—Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine
“[STARRED REVIEW] World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Central Station) will leave readers’ heads spinning with this disorienting and gripping alternate history. Author Lior Tirosh, grieving a personal tragedy, travels home after years abroad and immediately has a series of strange encounters that pull him into a complex plot to destroy the border between worlds. He arrives in Palestina, the land that the Jews were offered on the Ugandan border in 1904, which both closely resembles and is profoundly different from the Israel of our world, and is followed by two government agents who are trying to stop the destruction of ‘borders,’ though it’s unclear whose side they are really on. Tirosh discovers a niece he had forgotten, is accused of murder, narrowly dodges threats to his life, and takes on the role of a detective from one of his own novels as he tries to understand what is endangered and by whom. ‘No matter what we do, human history always attempts to repeat itself,’ Tidhar writes, even as he explores the substantial differences in history that might arise from single but significant choices. Readers of all kinds, and particularly fans of detective stories and puzzles, will enjoy grappling with the numerous questions raised by this stellar work.”
—Publishers Weekly
“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 Hussian, 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
Praise for Central Station
2017 John W. Campbell Award winner
2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award winner
2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, Best novel
2016 British Science Fiction Award longlist, Best novel
2017 British Science Fiction Award winner, Best artwork
2017 Geffen Award, Best Translated Science Fiction Book nominee
An NPR Best Book of 2016
A Tor.com Best Book of 2016
An Amazon Featured Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book
A Kirkus 2016 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy pick
A Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016
A UK Guardian Best SF & Fantasy Book of 2016
[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 . . . 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 “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
“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 best-selling Year’s Best Science Fiction series
“A dazzling tale of complicated politics and even more complicated souls. Beautiful.”
—Ken Liu, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy winner and author of The Grace of Kings
“If Nalo Hopkinson and William Gibson held a séance 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
“Central Station boasts complexity without complication, sharp prose, and a multi-dimensional world.”
—Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass
“A unique marriage of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, China Miéville, 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
“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
“I recommend it highly. It’ll stay with you for days, because every idea in it has more ideas under it. It’s all of science fiction distilled into a single book.”
—Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Gun Machine
“Sublimely sensual, emotionally moreish, and composed with crystalline clarity irrespective of its incredible complexity.”
—Tor.com
“Brimming with sensory detail and paying tribute to a plethora of science-fiction tropes, there are few works to rival Central Station.”
—Intergalactic Medicine Show
“Amidst the loves and the fears, Tidhar reminds us of the intoxicating and invigorating power of longing and nostalgia.”
—The Jewish Standard
Praise for the World Fantasy Award-winner, Osama
“Bears comparison with the best of Philip K. Dick”
—The Financial Times
“Exceptional”
—World Literature Today
Praise for The Violent Century
“A tour de force”
—James Ellroy, bestselling author of L.A. Confidential
“A stunning masterpiece”
—The Independent
“A new masterpiece”
—Library Journal
“Unforgettable”
—Jewish Standard
Praise for A Man Lies Dreaming
“A twisted masterpiece”
—Guardian
“Unmissable”
—The Telegraph
“Incredible”
—Tor.com
Praise for The Bookman
“An emerging master”
—Locus
“A steampunk treasure”
—SFF World
“Sparks like a Roman candle”
—Publishers Weekly
Visit the Lavie Tidhar website or follow him on Twitter.