Audio edition of Osama now available!

Audible have just released the audio book edition of Osama. It runs to 8 hours 27 minutes and narrated by Jeff Harding (who also narrates all the Lee Child books – I’m a bit of a fan!). You can get it from Audible.com or Audible.co.uk.

This is pretty awesome – the first of my novels to get the audio book treatment, and due to be followed up, in short order, by all three Bookman Histories novels, as well as The Tel Aviv Dossier.

Osama sells to mass market; Poland, Hungary; nominated for a Campbell Award

It’s been some time coming, but I’m delighted to announce that Solaris Books have bought mass market paperback edition rights to Osama! The mass market edition will be available in both the US and the UK and is due to be released in October 2012. It will use the same cover art as the PS edition, by the brilliant Pedro Marques.

In addition to that, my tireless agent has also sold Polish and Hungarian rights to the novel: Hungarian rights were bought by Ad Astra via Gynn Kalman of the Torus Books Agency on behalf of Zeno, and Polish rights went to MAG in a deal negotiated by Patrycja Swiat at ANAW Literary Agency on behalf of Zeno.

And, shortly after announcing this yesterday, I also found out that Osama is nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel. It’s in fantastic company there.

Five-book deal to Audible

I’m delighted to announce the audio rights sale of five novels to Audible.com, the Internet’s largest publisher of audio books. The sale was negotiated by my agents, John Berlyne and John Parker, of the Zeno Literary Agency.

Coming soon to audio, then!

• The Bookman
• Camera Obscura
• The Great Game
• The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv)
• Osama

Very excited about this, obviously!

Cheryl Morgan reviews Osama

SF critic Cheryl Morgan reviews Osama, calling it

a phenomenal achievement. I’d have no hesitation recommending it to a wide audience, because it is just the sort of science fiction that a mainstream audience would find easily accessible.

New Osama review

The Weekly Take reviews Osama:

In his new novel, Osama, Lavie Tidhar does something extraordinary: he takes the War on Terror and puts it in a pulp novel. That might sound dangerously insensitive to anyone who has lost someone in terrorist bombings or in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Tidhar treats his subject matter with sensitivity and the weight it deserves. … Osama is a wonderfully crafted alternate noir-ish tale that, despite its subject matter and its meta-flips, actually works. I highly recommend this.

The WISB Blog selects Osama as its novel of the year

The World In the Satin Bag blog,select their best of the year, with Osama chosen as the best novel of 2011.

Lavie Tidhar messed with my head.  Really.  Osama is one of the few novels I have had the pleasure to read that left me reeling at the end.  The book still haunts me, like a twisted ghost creature in literary form, banging on my walls, slamming my doors, and breaking my expensive Chinese teacups.  Osama is one of the most beautiful works of SF/F literature I’ve had the pleasure to read since I became an SF/F fan.  It’s on my list of Masterworks, that’s for sure.

World Literature Today on Osama

World Literature Review, the magazine of international literature and culture, has reviewed not only Osama, but also my two novellas from PS publishing, Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God and Cloud Permutations:

Osama is both a thriller and a beautifully crafted, serious novel. Tidhar has a gift for lyrical, sensory description laced with pitch-perfect similes and metaphors. Here his style is overtly cinematic: jump cuts, freeze-frames, and allusions to film noir, especially Casablanca (1942), all highlight questions about the nature of perceived reality. Using the distancing effects of genre—alternate-history science fiction and Chandleresque detective fiction—Tidar forces us to see our world anew, to question notions we might otherwise take, on faith or through inattention, as true. His focus is terrorism, the war on terror, and what both have done and are doing to us.

…

All three of these beautifully produced books are worth your attention. But Osama is exceptional. Compelling, confrontational, and surprisingly moving, it is one of the best novels yet on terror in our times. – read the full review!

SFX Weekender

I’m off on Thursday for the SFX Weekender in Prestatyn, Wales. Known to me previously only for the Philip Larkin Poem (“Come To Sunny Prestatyn / Laughed the girl on the poster, / Kneeling up on the sand   /In tautened white satin… etc.)

We’ll be launching two new books at the Weekender. The Great Game from Angry Robot Books – the third and, at least for the moment, final instalment of the Bookman Histories novels – and Going To The Moon, my picture book about a boy with Tourette’s, a collaboration with brilliant artist Paul McCaffery published by Murky Depths.

 

I will be hanging around the whole weekend – ideally somewhere warm (like the pub!). However, I will be doing a couple of official things on Friday:

• 17:00, Screening Zone – “How do you put the Punk into Steampunk?” panel, with Stephen Hunt, Robert Rankin and Jonathan Green (Moderator).

• 18:00, Bartertown – I will be signing copies of The Great Game (and whatever else is available!), alongside Andy Remic.

In addition, at 19:00, I will be going to the Kitschies Award ceremony (Screening Zone), where Osama is currently nominated for Best Novel.

Hope to see some – many! – of you there! I intend to be holed up in the pub with nothing but a packet of cheap sausages and a renegade dalek for company.

Osama nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award

Surprised and delighted to find out this morning that Osama has been nominated for Best Novel in the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards. Even more delighted that Pedro Marques’s amazing cover of Osama is also nominated!

Just look at that cover!

The full list of nominees:

Best Novel

Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)

Embassytown by China Mieville (Macmillan)

The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Best Short Fiction

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)

Covehithe by China Mieville (The Guardian)

Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

Best Non-Fiction

Out of This World: Science Fiction but not as we Know it by Mike Ashley (British Library)

The SF Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls and David Langford (website)

Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum (Asking the Wrong Questions blog)

SF Mistressworks, ed. Ian Sales (website)

Pornokitsch, ed. Jared Shurin and Anne Perry (website)

The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (Foundation Studies in Science Fiction), ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw (Science Fiction Foundation)

Best Art

Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman (Solaris)

Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay (Walker)

Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques (PS Publishing)

Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth (Newcon Press)

Book Porn Sunday

first review for The Great Game!

Not only returns to, but surpasses, the promise of the first volume of the series… I heartily recommend The Great Game; not only a satisfying read, but an enjoyable, fun, and interesting one too.

And here’s an actual photo of the printed book! I’ve not seen any yet myself, but this is proof they’re real! (courtesy of SF Signal)

And here’s another review of Osama!

Osama is several things; a hard-boiled detective novel, an alt-history and, in places, it feels like a document of the last decade or so. Also, impressively, Tidhar has created an intensely personal work, yet one which manages to keep some critical distance from what is an emotive subject. I wonder if it is this that makes Osama the most assured piece of work I’ve read by him… This is an incredibly brave, but more importantly, assured novel from Tidhar. It deserves a wide readership.

And hey, Going To The Moon is back from the printers and here’s proof!

It’s alive! Alive!

We’ll be launching both The Great Game and Going To The Moon at the SFX Weekender, 2-5 Feb. in Prestatyn, Wales. Should be fun!