The Bookman released in Germany!

I’m delighted to say the German edition of The Bookman is now out! Bookman: Das Ewige Empire 1 (Bookman: The Eternal Empire 1) is now out from my German publishers, Piper Verlag, translated by Michael Koseler.

For German readers, The Bookman is reviewed in The Daily Steampunk by Marcus Rauchfuss, who says: Ein faszinierender, vielschichtiger Steampunkroman, der in keiner Sammlung fehlen sollte. 10 von 10 Zeppelinen.

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!

New reviews for Gorel and The Bookman

A couple of new reviews have just appeared. First off, Pornokistch review Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God:

Lavie Tidhar’s Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011) is a self-styled “guns and sorcery” novella. Mr. Tidhar, as previously noted, is one of the great masters of the pastiche. In this instance, however, Mr. Tidhar has created something uniquely his own – a delightfully Weird pulp tale that could easily sit on a shelf alongside Leiber, Vance and Moorcock. – continue reading or buy the book.

Second, Red Rook Review reads The Bookman:

The Bookman, a mesmerizing tour-de-force, refreshes Steampunk, while adhering to its basic elements and demonstrating the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the genre and his endearing love of literature. Its major theme is myth; however, its subsidiary theme is books or, more, precisely literature. – continue reading or buy the book.

Get The Bookman for just 99p!

Angry Robot Books have gone craaaaaazy! You can now get The Bookman for the Kindle for just 99p!

That’s right! 99 pence!

What are you waiting for!

And if that’s not all, you get a set of steak knives absolutely free!!*

Get The Bookman for just 99p now!

* no you don’t.

Camera Obscura – now on the Kindle!

You can now get Camera Obscura in a Kindle edition – $7.99 US, or £4.48 UK.

You can also get The Bookman for the Kindle now – £4.48 (but currently on £3.58) UK, or $6.79 US.

On Bad Reviews

Everyone gets bad reviews. Some of my personal favourites for The Bookman – the 1- and 2-star reviews on Amazon UK – include:

• Utter tripe.
• I no longer need worry about a cure for insomnia.
• It made my head thump trying to read it.
• This novel is so slow that I tended to drift away thinking about other things, like washing-up or something.
• Totally unreadable.
• Whilst you may have the ingredients to bake a cake, it does not follow that you will end up with something edible.
• I could be kind and say the author has recreated authentically some of the poor writing of the period, but that’s not really an excuse.
• [an] aimless and absurd book.
• Yuk.
• I’m not getting the next book, it’ll just irritate me, I’ll start moaning to my wife about it and she’ll start Tutting at me…..it’s not worth it.

Some of them are great! Anyway it awakened my competitive streak – why should other people have all the fun? – so here’s my own put-down of The Bookman, with an appropriately obscure reference to boot!

Reading Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman made me want to smash my head against the looking glass repeatedly, all the while screaming ‘How’s Annie! How’s Annie! How’s Annie!

The Bookman – now on the Kindle!

Yes, ’tis true! ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, in fact!

The Bookman is now available for the Kindle! You can get it – without, as I understand, geographic restrictions – over on Amazon.co.uk – or you can get it in North America on Amazon.com.

Download away, me hearties!

I’m currently working on the third book, provisionally titled The Great Game – a rousing spy novel featuring, in no particular order, Harry Houdini, tripods, the Ark of the Covenant, more assassins than you can shake a stick at, Miss Havisham, Oliver Twist, airship battles, and the Comte de Rochefort. You have been warned.

Foreign Rights Sales for The Bookman

I don’t think I mentioned this before, but the contracts are signed, so…

• Hebrew rights to The Bookman went to Rani Graff at Graff Publishing, via John Berlyne of the Zeno Literary Agency.
• German rights to The Bookman went to Piper Verlag, via John Berlyne of the Zeno Literary Agency.

That is all!

The Bookman Reviewed

A lovely review for The Bookman from SF Book Review!

If the British Library was a living entity and, on wanting to write a book was told ‘write what you know’ then this is the book it would write.

[. . .]

This is one of those books which you can’t put down and yet you don’t want to reach the end because then it will be all over and reality will rear its ugly head in your brain. It’s a book which makes you resent all those little things which get in the way; eating, sleeping, children, work are all annoyances and must be kept to a minimum until you get to the end.

The Bookman reviewed in Locus!

Faren Miller reviews The Bookman in the Feb. 2011 issue of Locus Magazine:

Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman brings us back to a London where people out of history (in this case, late Victorian times) mingle with more exotic entities at a moment where human civilization is under threat. Unlike the resentful dragons of Pevel’s France [Pierre Pevel's novel is reviewed previous to The Bookman], in this England giant alien lizards rule. While under the claw of extraterrestrials, London still manages to be cosmopolitan; the cast includes touring American circus performers and visiting Russian [sic] scholar Karl Marx (potential leader of rebellion?).

Mingling the historic with tropes and entities out of pulp SF, steampunk, the period-appropriate mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and an earlier poem about some Ancient Mariner, Tidhar brings an unexpected sense of purpose to his wild gumbo of genres by drawing upon more primal realms of poetry and myth. Deliberate references to Orpheus and Eurydice and the Epic of Gilgamesh, along with other great works from olden times, echo throughout this tale of the young poet known only as Orphan and his quest for knowledge of both his own true identity and that of the more darkly mysterious Bookman: a trek that takes him far from London, gathering scraps of information from many informants, including one who calls himself Gilgamesh.

When it identifies most strongly with its ardent poet (not yet reduced to the weary cynicism of an older man, and possibly destined for greatness in the future of his embattled Earth), Bookman can sometimes go heavy on the similes,  metaphors and portents, but fortunately, all those other antic elements keep coming back to lighten the mood. Thus, while books from the library of retired circus celebrity Tom Thumb lie strewn throughout the place “like sleeping domestic cats glorying in the dimness of the room and the heat of the fireplace”, they range from heavy illustrated tome The Sedge Moths of Northern Vespuccia (our world’s America) to “the latest catalogue of Smedley’s Hydropathic Company, advertising their brand new electrocution tanks (Heal Any Disease)”, and works of fiction including The Twelve Hours of the Night by poet William Ashbless and the novelistic debut of one Herbert Wells.

That mixture or juggling act involving themes, tones and literary forms, both high and low, is the greatest feat of legerdemain by this Israeli author. In The Bookman, he essentially pulls off the impossible. And of course there will be a sequel – at the end of this volume, the publisher provides some excerpts from Camera Obscura.