Unholy land

A statement for the stateless

released OUT NOW! 262 pages | Paperback/ebook

Author lavie Tidhar Publisher Tachyon Publications

As the characters of Unholy Land shift between parallel realities, the novel often seems to shift between different texts: a plot point or piece of terminology will recall The City & The City, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Third Man, City Of Glass, The Man In The High Castle... Yet Lavie Tidhar takes an angle that is startlingly bold and relevant. It might be the most important SF novel published this year.

The plot follows Lior Tirosh, a Jewish pulp writer living in Berlin, as he returns to his homeland. Yet this isn’t the world we know: Tirosh comes from a Jewish state in East Africa, disputed by the native Ugandans. Upon arrival he finds himself the chief suspect in a murder and on the trail of his missing niece Deborah, and morphs into the sort of detective he usually writes about. He also realises that he has memories of two incompatible worlds.

There’s a lot going on here, and Tidhar has kept it to pulp-novel length rather than let it sprawl. It’s narrated in first person, second person and third person in different chapters, so it can be hard to locate yourself in it – presumably a deliberate tactic, as it links so well with the book’s themes. Tirosh’s story, at the centre, pulls the reader through: he becomes a disorientated noir hero in the Philip Marlowe style, which becomes a metaphor for statelessness. He’s not sure where he belongs or what his story is.

The possibility of a Jewish state in Africa is a matter of historical fact – it was given serious consideration in the early 20th century – and Tidhar could have made a novel purely out of exploring this “What if?” situation. But Unholy Land does more than that: it uses parallel-world fiction to examine the whole concept of borders. It’s a sensitive, heartfelt and exciting novel. Eddie Robson

Takes an angle that is startlingly bold

Tel Aviv’s name was inspired by Altneuland (1902), a utopian novel written by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.