The Violent Century is officially published today! There’s a review in today’s Metro, saying:
It’s the X-Men as written by John le Carré, a shadowy alternate history in which cynical Cold War compromises are all too real. Agents Fogg and Oblivion investigate a conspiracy dating back 75 years to post-war Berlin.
The British duo haven’t aged since 1932, when hundreds of mutants were created from the sub-atomic wave unleashed by a German scientist. Several years later, warring nations rally the troops with front-line superheroes but some end up as grisly Übermenschen experiments in Auschwitz.
Tidhar’s Jewish heritage enriches his self-aware, tersely styled narrative. A love story and meditation on heroism, this is an elegiac espionage adventure that demands a second reading.
Which is nice!
The book is available in the UK in hardcover (currently discounted!), as an audio book (read by Jonathan Keeble) and, of course, for the Kindle.
[It is also available for US readers as an export hardcover, in audio or for the Kindle.]
Sorry all the links are to Amazon, but you can also get it from the Play store, Audible, Waterstones, Forbidden Planet and so on (and there should be signed copies in London at least by next week). In fact, I’ll be signing copies on Monday at the Secret Histories event at Blackwell’s, Charing Cross Road, with Tim Powers and Kate Griffin (sadly the event is sold out).
The signed limited edition, meanwhile, is available for pre-order and will be launched at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton next week.
THE VIOLENT CENTURY
They’d never meant to be heroes.
For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.
But there must always be an account… and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.
Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism – a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields – to answer one last, impossible question:
What makes a hero?
Lavie Tidhar 