A Man Lies Dreaming
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“The best book I read last year is A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar... It is so cleverly constructed and such a spectacular conclusion unfolds that you are going to take it all very seriously.” – Sting
“Ambitious as hell” –Ian Rankin
“An excellent novel” –Philip Kerr
Since its original 2014 publication, A Man Lies Dreaming has been translated into multiple languages and gained a cult following for its dark humor, prescient politics and powerful exploration of the impossibility of fantasy.
1939: Adolf Hitler, fallen from power, seeks refuge in a London engulfed in the throes of a very British Fascism. Now eking a miserable living as a down-at-heels private eye and calling himself Wolf, he has no choice but to take on the case of a glamorous Jewish heiress whose sister went missing.
It’s a decision Wolf will very shortly regret.
For in another time and place a man lies dreaming: Shomer, once a Yiddish pulp writer, who dreams lurid tales of revenge in the hell that is Auschwitz.
Prescient, darkly funny and wholly original, the award-winning A Man Lies Dreaming is a modern fable for our time that comes “crashing through the door of literature like Sam Spade with a .38 in his hand” (Guardian).
PRAISE FOR LAVIE TIDHAR
“Tidhar is a genius at conjuring realities that are just two steps to the left of our own.” –NPR
“Tidhar changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.” –Library Journal
“In a genre entirely of his own, and quite possibly a warped genius.” –Ian McDonald, author of River of Gods
“Already staked a claim as the genre’s most interesting, most bold, and most accomplished writer.” –Locus
“Tidhar is a master at taking concepts that really shouldn’t work and crafting them into something uniquely brilliant.” –GeekDad
“He is perhaps the UK’s most literary speculative fiction writer.” –Strange Horizons
“Like early Kurt Vonnegut… both writers seem to channel the same prankster glee that covers deep despair.” –Locus
“Bears comparison with the best of Philip K Dick” –The Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even devoted fans of revisionist fiction might blanche at the premise of Tidhar's latest, which supposes that the National Socialists lost their bid for Germany in 1933, after which the country fell into the hands of Jewish Communists in an event known as the Fall. Now it's 1939 and an underworld of ex-Nazis has taken root in London, where they are essentially an oppressed minority. One of their number is Wolf, a hard-bitten detective with a mysterious past, who breaks his rule against taking on Jewish clients to locate a beautiful woman's missing sister. Soon Wolf is enmeshed in the search for a murderer, uncovering a conspiracy with links to the identity he left behind in Nuremberg and will go to any length to keep hidden. And then there are the dreams that haunt Wolf: dreams of a man named Shomer, a prisoner in a concentration camp who himself dreams of another world. This sounds provocative and transgressive, but the execution is strictly by the numbers. The noir elements are deadeningly predictable and Wolf's investigation quickly turns into a game of spot-the-historical-figure. This is a toothless exercise of What If topped with a trite twist.
