The Tel Aviv Dossier, Now in Audio!

I’m delighted to announce that The Tel Aviv Dossier, my 2009 novel co-written with Nir Yaniv, is now available as an audiobook!

The audio book runs 7 hours and 35 minutes and is narrated by Eric Meyers. It is available directly via Audible, or through Amazon.com or Amazon UK.

Note that Nir’s name is missing from the credits, I hope it will be rectified very shortly.

What is it like? Here’s an Amazon review I quite like…

Have you ever thought to yourself, “You know, the books I’m reading just aren’t crazy enough”? If so, THE TEL AVV DOSSIER might be something for you.
This is one of those rare books that defies all explanation. If you try to explain the plot to someone, you end up sounding like a rambling lunatic.
So I will just tell you this: It’s crazy.
And awesome.
And really original.
It’s the kind of book that makes you think WTF?, but I mean that in a good way. I am seriously in love with this book. It stays with you. It haunts you. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about this book. Dwelling on it. Trying to interpret it. I don’t know if I’ve come up with any solid answers yet, but the journey has been a good time.

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!

The Tel Aviv Dossier

The Tel Aviv Dossier is now available in the UK from Cheryl Morgan’s specialist Wizard’s Tower Books!

Hebrew Edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier now in stores!

The Hebrew edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier – ימי תל אביב האחרונים – (The Last Days of Tel Aviv, to you!) has come back from the printers and into the shops. Nice to see it in my nearest shop, too, from where this rather bad photo was taken!

Icon photos – Day 1

Still recovering – had a long week and not enough sleep. Some exciting developments on the books front that I can’t mention yet, but meant I spent most of yesterday on skype and e-mail. In the meantime!

At the Cinemateque bookshop stall, with The Apex Book of World SF.

Nir Yaniv with The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, which includes his story “Painter, a Sheep and a Boa Constrictor” in my translation.

Very first copies of the Hebrew edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier!

You Never Run out of Amos Oz

I received a couple of copies of the new Hebrew edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier – shiny! And leafing through it I came across this passage, which made me laugh.

‘It’s a steam engine,’ Dganit said, and you could smear that pride over bread and call it butter – ‘a marvel of engineering and ingenuity.’

‘But, but – but what do you feed it with?’ I said, perplexed.

She looked at me in surprise. ‘Well, books,’ she said.

‘Books?’

‘Of course. Do you know how many books there are in Tel Aviv? It’s a great untapped natural resource!’

‘Books,’ I said.

‘We – that is, the Faculty, of which I am Head, hold every branch of Steimatzky’s in town! Not to mention the Book Junction, the independents, and the warehouses of the all the major publishers!’

‘I… see,’ I said.

‘Right now we’re powering the engine with as much Amos Oz to get us to the moon and back! And when we run out –‘

‘You never run out of Amos Oz!’ someone shouted at the back.

‘We will use A.B. Yehoshua! Meir Shalev! Giants in their field! Mines to be, well – mined!’

‘Well said!’

‘And if that ever runs out, there’s always the Da Vinci Code,’ Dganit said. ‘Excellent book. Many pages. Burns well.

Announcing the new Hebrew edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier!

I am delighted to announce the imminent release of the Israeli edition of The Tel Aviv Dossier, the supernatural disaster novel I co-wrote with Nir Yaniv. It is published by Odyssey Publishing and translated by Itamar Faran. The cover artwork is the same as the Chizine edition, by the extremely talented Erik Mohr.

Advance copies of the novel will be available for sale at Icon, the Israeli SF convention, from Sunday 26, with bookshop distribution to follow. Nir and I will be discussing the novel on Monday 27, 20:00, at the Eshkol arena.

The Tel Aviv Dossier now available for the Kindle in the UK

The Tel Aviv Dossier is now available on Amazon UK in a Kindle edition. It is also available as a regular paperback.

The Tel Aviv Dossier Reviewed

T.J. McIntyre reviews The Tel Aviv Dossier:

One word review: fun!

This novel is insane. It is an often pessimistic mosaic of modern Israeli culture, society, and beliefs. It captures moments of clarity and meaning while examining what happens when our mundane reality butts up against an absurd apocalyptic event.

Told in short bursts from multiple perspectives, the narrative pulls you in and doesn’t let you go. The story lingers long after you breeze through it.  It gives us the story of Tel Aviv as it suffers a cataclysmic event. The world goes nuts. Some people cling to their sanity and societal values. Others embrace the madness as mountains rise, and all laws, including the laws of physics, are broken.

Yet, in all this insanity there are still moments of real insight, but the novel never gets bogged down in rationales or meaning. This narrative is as chaotic as the event it describes.

There’s a severed head that rolls around and talks and stuff. This is just that kind of book, and I loved it!

Interview, and review of The Tel Aviv Dossier

The Boston Book Bums blog has just reviewed The Tel Aviv Dossier:

Pop-culture become spiritual landmarks, obscured through time and turned profound by reinterpretation.

Tel Aviv Doisser shows you that common men and women can, when put into fantastic circumstance, become prophets, devils or disciples. You don’t need to be a religious scholar to appreciate the subtext and eschatological sarcasm oozing from Tel Aviv Dossier.

Will the fragmented archival style and occasionally disjointed storyline lose people? Yes. However, for us, these snap-shots are a literary devices that capture an authenticity, stealing facts, no matter how surreal. Tidhar and Yaniv utilize the device to blend biblical credibility into an absurd Apocalypse.

And calling Tel Aviv Dossier broadly Lovecraftian fits, so long as you throw in the pop-culture sensibilities of Nick Hornby with travelogue written up by Hunter S. Thompson.

And an interview with myself and Nir Yaniv, talking about the book, has just been published by SF Signal:

CT: How have your personal lives influenced the writing of the book?

LT: Well, Nir lives a little like an old Turkish Sultan – he lives in a converted apartment block gutted out from the inside – just this big huge space filled with water fountains, rare orchids and wild birds, where the smell of sweet opium and the pleasant sound of young women chatting permeate the air. So it’s hard to get him to write anything. Every word he writes is like a precious stone – he picks it up, looks at it from all directions, sniffs it, tastes it, puts it in its place, then moves on to the next word while sipping sherry out of a crystal goblet that may or may not be the genuine Holy Grail.

And obviously, the psychotic fireman-cum-messiah in The Tel Aviv Dossier pretty much is Nir.

NY: Have you ever wondered why you never see Lavie anywhere? I shall give you the answer right now, and if you’re as experienced an SF fan as you must be in order to be reading this interview, you won’t be surprised: Lavie is the Invisible Man.

As such, it’s quite easy to see how he was the inspiration behind all those mysterious forces which destroyed Tel Aviv so effortlessly in our book. I just had to invent the rest and let Lavie write some of it.