Oyou to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this thought provoking book. The story's premise is based on an expedition taken in the early 20th century, the goal of which was to found a Jewish homeland in East Africa. In the book itself a man, whose name is so close to the author's that we know we are entering territory that overlaps Tidhar's life, leaves Berlin on a trip to see his ailing father in Palestina, near Uganda. Tirosh is an author of fantasies and mysteries and as he travels he seems to suffer an odd sort of memory loss. Once he reaches the land where he was born he becomes enmeshed in unexplained murders and intrigue. There is social unrest surrounding a wall being built to keep the former natives of the land out of what is now Palestina. The story asks questions about boundaries, particularly the artificial ones of countries or constructed walls. At one point a question is asked of the main character: Do you think the world is real? And if there is more than one reality, whose to say which one is the real one or the better one?

Tirosh is asked why he writes fantasy. He replies that "stories don't predict the future....(they warn) about what the future could become." In the afterward the author reminds us that as much as we readers and writers love our fantasies with often hopeful solutions to human struggles, we live in this world with no easy answers.

Unholy Land was well written and even when I wasn't sure whose voice was telling the story I was totally absorbed. I highly recommend this book and suggest readers keep their eyes open for surprising clues throughout the book.

Set in a world where the historical 'Uganda Plan' to make a Jewish homeland in Kenya (don't ask) came to fruition in the early 20th century, this initially felt a bit too much like a straight cross between Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union and, in its veiled reference to 'crosshatch' and disputed territories, Mieville's The City & the City - though to be fair, the blurb is entirely open about this. On top of which, you have the overly clear correspondences to the way Zionism panned out in our own world - a nation facing a permanent refugee issue (albeit here Nandi rather than Palestinian), suspicious neighbours, and suicide bombings, but above all a lingering fear that the oppressed have in turn become oppressors. Hell, not only do they have a wall, they have what sounds a lot like shitty Banksy art* on it, just as Israel does here. Even the fact that the protagonist, Lior Tirosh, shares initials, a career and a few specific books with Tidhar himself felt a bit like the will-this-do? end of metafiction, and I worried that, while I've loved most of the Tidhar I've read, I might have to file this with his st**mp*nk Bookman among the occasional failures that attend his willingness always to try something new.

But roughly a quarter of the way through, something about the sheer accumulation of references and strangenesses produced an emergent quality of brilliance. The Tirosh stuff becomes a gently savage self-portrait of Tidhar, his pretensions and his fans. The whole ecosystem of an alternate world Jewish pulp fiction scene that never was ensorcels. The sense of a thinning between worlds - somehow linked to the strengthening of borders between nations - starts to feel distinctly Vandermeer. We glimpse other dimensions - fevered nightmares of our own, but also others better or worse or just very different, and the methods of travel between them which derive from, or are analogous to, the kaballah. It's like Philip K Dick if he'd been in control of his own visions, especially in the wonderful, terrifying scene where Tirosh gets a call on his mobile - which he half-knows nobody else has, and which before and after the call is a glasses case, because he's visiting from further away than he knows. Palestina becomes more solid, helped by Tidhar's gift for evocative descriptions which take in all the senses - he's the sort of writer careful to ensure you even know how his cities smell, not just as a whole but district by district. And if I hadn't already been won over, towards the end he nods to Robert Holdstock's own sagas of the places where worlds become blurred, and the more desolate visions of Clark Ashton Smith. I'm still not sure I'd rank it alongside the beautiful Central Station or the best of Tidhar's short work, and you'll see the ending coming a mile off, but there are wonders here.

*If you'll excuse the tautology.

(Netgalley ARC)

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lior Tirosh, the main character in Lavie Tidhar's novel, may as well be the author. I mean, the author certainly seems to think so, both being more or less a self-described semi-successful pulp-fiction writer of SF, and like writers being in their own stories, they tend to go absolutely nuts on the imagination bits.

Well, at least, the good ones do. And guess what? He's one of the good ones. :)

This book wears several hats and unlike a normal hat-trick, this one does it gently enough that we barely even realize we've gone from a noir mystery in an alternate history to jump headlong into an existential crisis across multiple Earths where neither memory, history, or selfhood is set in stone.

Add to that the wonderful little twist where this is a history where Isreal never happened, where the grand refuge takes place in Africa... a thing that really and truly MIGHT have happened... throw in the Zohar and wonderfully interesting quasi-religious ideas that drive the Qabbalah, including the words of God and reading the Torah from a prism of different experiences and world-building viewpoints, and we've got a much deeper reading experience than anyone might assume from a first glance.

In fact, even tho the actual tale is fun to follow and only gets more and more interesting even as it amps up the bloodshed and deeper mystery, it deserves another read-through for the subtext. It's not just about the Jewish condition although that is a big part. It's about identity on a much deeper level.

I only read Central Station before this and both are very different beasts, but neither of them is lightweight or pulp in nature. Indeed, I'm rather thrilled at how many levels both succeeded.

Unholy Land is probably BETTER than Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union, by the by. The other had them all retreat to Alaska and this one had them wind up in Africa, but the true joy isn't in the location. It's in everything. :)

This is the sort of book that makes you simultaneously go what did I just read and how awesome was that. Speculative fiction at its finest. Tidhar seamlessly blends alternate pasts with fantasy with science fiction and throws in biographical notes for a book unlike any other. It is precisely this one of a kind singular quality of it that really wowed me, despite a dizzying switching around of perspectives. It’s a tricky book, it starts off as a fairly straight forward story of a man, a writer of detective novels, whose name Lior Tirosh isn’t all that dissimilar to the author’s, going to visit his father in Africa. The twist is that in this reality the British Uganda proposition of the early 1900s became a reality and Jews now have a place of their own in a carved out land in Africa, albeit with all the sociopolitical difficulties of the modern Israel, challenges from locals and, of course, the debate around a boundary wall. The other twist is that there are many realities. The story concentrates on three of them with representatives from each offering their own perspectives in first, second and third person and yes, it’ll confuse you. But it’s woven together so cleverly, you can’t help but admire it, like a stunning tapestry where the grand design overwhelms the myriad of threads. Tirosh is a man who has the ability to slip between the alternate realities, so while he becomes a protagonist of his own stories in the main one by trying to be a detective, in other ones things are much more complicated. Palestina, the mythical African land for the Jewish people, might have been a reality, in fact. The survey was undertaken, but different choices were made. To think how such a thing might have played out, how different WWII would have been, is mind boggling. Alternate realities are haunting with all their countless what ifs and what might have beens and Tidhar utilizes that ingeniously in his book. String theories of possibilities are fascinating to fictionally visit. And while, much like time travelling, for me they can be frustratingly confusing (too much against naturally linear brain composition probably), this maze was well worth navigating. A satisfying, intelligent entertaining puzzle of a novel and a most auspicious introduction to a new author. Also technically counts as international reading, the author, originally from Israel, has lived all over. Strikingly original, inventive, imaginative. A very enjoyable read. Thanks Netgalley.

Unholy Land was one of those books that fit a whole lot of things I love into one book. Noir, science fiction, alternate history, political/social/historical commentary, existential crises, all that good stuff.

It was, from the start, quite pulpy and does set itself up as a kind of contemporary detective story. We follow a writer, Lior Tirosh (who has a lot of real world similarities to Lavie Tidhar) as he returns from Berlin to his home country Palestina, a Jewish state in the middle of Africa. Slowly we realise that nothing is quite what it seems to Tirosh as his memory becomes muddy and his actions confuse those around him. We begin to understand the world that he left behind in Berlin is not quite the same as the one he's now entered in Palestina. And before long, Tirosh falls into a kind of reluctant hero-detective narrative as he searches for a missing niece but of course that isn't straightforward in the least either.

The book blew me away for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of moving pieces to the story and Lavie Tidhar handles it all like a virtuoso. How he plays with alternate histories and the questioning of what history even means, how history is just a convenient narrative we impose upon chaos, was particularly an idea that appealed to me.

And the way Tidhar handled using 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person narrators in a way that wasn't confusing and didn't grow tiresome, as a writer, floored me. Rather than just choosing a POV for the sake of it each one serves a purpose and functions as yet another way to view something, which plays back into the whole alternative history/what-does-history-even-mean thing. Wonderful.

As an example, the third person narrator is one that feels as though we're all pretty indoctrinated from a lifetime of reading to think of as a reassuring one. But here it becomes more sinister. At least it did for me. It made me think it had an agenda all on its own and I began to question what version of reality/history I was really being told and by whom.

I just loved this book and I'm looking forward to reading more by Lavie Tidhar.

Not really sure where to begin with my review for Unholy Land, which I picked up as an uncorrected proof on Netgalley - as a result, knowing little about the book and also missing the fact it was labelled as 'literary fiction' (a category which really does very little for me), I wondered if the things that didn't quite mesh together right at the beginning were just errors on the part of the author, only to discover later they were probably stylistic choices.

Anyway, on to the plot. Initially, Unholy Land is alternate history - in this case, a history where instead of settling in Israel, Jews fleeing from Europe settled an area of central Africa and made for themselves a land called Palestina. For anyone who knows something of the current situation in the Middle East, there's something a little ironic about the fact that, as a result, the Jewish community in this scenario call themselves Palestinians. Anyway, our main character is a writer of pulp detective stories called Lior who is returning to Palestina after living in Germany, having recently suffered a terrible loss.

However, as we discover throughout the book, there is more going on here than initially meets the eye and Lior himself begins to have trouble sorting out his own memories from what everyone else seems to think has happened. Landing in Palestina, where the inhabitants are busy building a massive wall to secure their ownership of the land, Lior finds himself involved in the murder of an old friend and that's just the beginning of the difficulties he faces.The spaces between the different realities are wearing thin.

This isn't the easiest novel to read and half the time I'm pretty sure I had little idea exactly what was going on, not helped by the number of points of view that get used along the way. I was also a little thrown by how autobiographical it is - having read some of the author's comments before the story itself, I could see where his experience was cropping up as Lior's, though it's quite possible given the nature of the story that this was again a deliberate choice. It's just a little too much work to keep track of what's going on and I'm left feeling glad that I picked this up where and how I did, as it's not something I'll want to read again.


I received this book as an uncorrected proof from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Using the Kabbalah's concept of sefirot, or mystical and creative forces that change the world, as a framework, Tidhar creates multiple tantalizing and richly detailed worlds through which his characters slip. Following three characters who have slipped between various worlds, in which a Jewish homeland has been established in differing places and through differing means, the novel is both a mystery and a meditation on the appeal of "what-ifs" and "might-have-beens" to readers, writers, and politicians.

In Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar, pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh journeys to his homeland of Palestina, which happens to be near the East Coast of Africa. He ends up looking for his missing niece, and gradually the novel morphs into an alternate reality novel which keeps the reader guessing up into the end (and leaving considerable interpretation up to the reader).

The novel has all the hallmarks of Tidhar's vivid writing style - he's very good at creating imagery, setting scenes - like the sights and the smells of the markets and back alleys in the old city. There are also little reminders of places and characters we read about earlier in the novel, that appear later, linked in a different scene - which is quite well done.

The author knows his modern middle eastern history well too - the idea of a Jewish homeland in Africa was explored at the turn of the 20th century, and the novel itself is an allegory for current times in the Middle East.

The pace of the story slowed a bit in the first third or so, but picked up nicely soon after. Overall another accomplished novel from the author, which also included an interesting afterword on some of the history behind it.

3.5 of 5 stars. Quick paced and thoroughly entertaining. This is ostensibly an Alternate History story, based on a real proposal from the early 20th century to create a Jewish homeland in Africa. However, it evolves into much more, casting its fantasy roots as a kind of cross parallel universe adventure, with Philip K Dick like reality distorting overtones. And all the while drawing parallels and observations about the modern day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I also can't help but assume some deep semi-autobiographical overtones between the author and the protagonist, more than just in name (Lavie Tidhar and Lior Tirosh respectively) and profession (novelist).

A thoughtful romp through some might-have-been worlds, Tidhar's newest work shows a new familial side to the genre. Thoroughly enjoyable, though a bit jumpy, he does an excellent job of letting the reader figure out what is going on. I don't generally care for that style, but he pulled me into the story so well that I will definitely be suggesting this to people looking for an alternate worlds read.

Tidhar combines alternate history, alternate realities, and thinly disguised politics in his latest novel. One of these novels that seemingly couldn’t decide what it was.

Unholy Land is a stunning achievement. It is packed to the brim with engaging ideas and features a captivating story that I could not stop puzzling over. It will certainly find itself in my Top 10 of 2018 when the year comes to a close.

In the early 20th century, a group of expeditioners traveled to the border of Uganda to inspect a piece of land that was under consideration as a potential site for a Jewish homeland. This site had no holy significance, which made it a difficult sell to “Holy Landers” who considered settling in then-Ottoman Palestine to be a more appropriate choice. Unholy Land explores an alternate history where Jewish settlement in Africa had occurred, as well as the otherworldly borders that came to surround such a place.

I can’t say more about the plot without taking away from what I found to be a marvelous reading experience. There is such an ethereal and intoxicating quality to the story and Tidhar’s writing that I found myself floating through the chapters, not always sure what was happening, or whose perspective we were seeing, but knowing that I wanted to keep reading. The intersecting story threads twisted my brain into a pretzel and I loved it.

Having never read any other work by author Lavie Tidhar, I was blown away by his command of language — every sight, smell, and feeling of a scene is accounted for and communicated in vivid detail. On prose alone, I would have enjoyed this book, but pairing such good writing with such a conceptually intriguing story made for truly enjoyable reading. I look forward to exploring Tidhar’s other works and I hope he continues to write beautiful and thought-provoking speculative fiction.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.