Tidhar, Lavie – The Bell Bookshop

Six Lives

Emma — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SIX LIVES
Six lives, connected through blood and history, each rooted in the dirt of their inheritance, look to the future, and what it might hold.

THE GUANO MERCHANT
In 1855, Edward Feebes travels to the guano islands of South America to investigate an irregularity in the accounts of the House of Feebes & Co.

MOMENTO MORI
In 1912, post-mortem photographer and reluctant blackmailer Annie Connolly plots her escape from Ireland to America on board the Titanic.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE MURDER
In 1933, idealistic Edgar Waverley faces a choice of the heart when he becomes embroiled in a country house murder.

THE SPY
In 1964, hapless KGB agent Vasily Sokolov makes his career conjuring valuable information from worthless detritus.

ZABBALEEN
in 1987, actor Mariam Khouri looks back at Black Dirt, the movie that lifted her from the streets of Cairo.

NEW YORK
In 2012, Isabelle Feebes attempts to break with her poisonous heritage once and for al. Can she forge a new life for herself in the New World? Can you ever truly escape your past?

The best of world SF. Volume 4

Emma — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

SHORTLISTED FOR ‘BEST COLLECTION’ AT THE BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION AWARDS 2023The third annual instalment to the ‘excellent, lovingly curated’ (Financial Times) The Best of World SF series The Best of World SF series is a fixture on the global science fiction scene. If you want to find the most exciting SF authors writing today, look no further. In this third instalment, you’ll discover alien artists, rioting dinosaurs, shape-shifting rabbits, heartbreak-harvesting cafes and one robot on a quest for meaning. You will be transported to the stars and back down to Earth and sideways, with the order of the world turned upside down. Featuring authors from Austria, Bulgaria, China, Finland, Ghana, Greece, India, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore and South Africa, this collection’s stories have been selected by award-winning writer, editor and World SF expert Lavie Tidhar. The most exciting science fiction on the planet comes from all corners of the globe. And it’s all in the Best of World SF series.

Adama

Emma — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

THERE IS NO LAND WITHOUT BLOOD, AND I WATER THIS LAND WITH THE BLOOD OF MY MEN.Ruth’s family were in Budapest when the Nazis came.Now Ruth is in Palestine, amid the bare hills inland from Haifa, breaking the rocky soil of an unyielding land before it breaks her.With her comrades, her fellow kibbutzniks, she will build a better world. There will be green grass, orange trees and pomegranates, a land that is their own and no one else’s.So they till their fields, dig their wells, build their homes and forge a new way of living, fiercely proud of their shared pursuit of a dream.But as one generation begets another, the dream unravels, twisted into a dark tapestry of secrets and lies; sacrificed for revenge, forbidden love and murder.A sweeping historical epic following four generations of a single family as they struggle to hold on to their land and each other.‘Lavie Tidhar’s prose is beautiful, his characters lacerating and heartbreaking… I loved it.’ Catriona Ward‘Adama is an unstoppable masterpiece… Tidhar is one of the finest writers around’ Junot Díaz‘A propulsive, decades-spanning noir saga. I couldn’t put it down.’ Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Maror

Emma — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘A masterpiece of the sacred and the profane… A literary triumph.’ Jake Arnott, GuardianHow do you build a nation?It takes statesmen and soldiers, farmers and factory workers, of course. But it also takes thieves, prostitutes and policemen.Nation-building demands sacrifice. And one man knows exactly where those bodies are buried: Cohen, a man who loves his country. A reasonable man for unreasonable times.A car bomb in the back streets of Tel Aviv. A diamond robbery in Haifa. Civil war in Lebanon. Rebel fighters in the Colombian jungle. A double murder in Los Angeles.How do they all connect? Only Cohen knows.Maror is the story of a war for a country’s soul – a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents.It is a true story. All of these things happened.Praise for Maror: ‘A bloody beast of a book.’ Daily Mail ‘This is crime writing in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens and a major achievement, full of sound, fury, drugs and blood… An earthquake of a book.’ CrimeTime ‘Some write in ink, others in song, Tidhar writes in fire… Maror is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece, immense in its sympathies, alarming in its irreverences and altogether exhilarating.’ Junot Díaz ‘One of the boldest, most visionary writers I’ve ever read creates both a vivid political exploration and a riveting crime epic. It’s like the Jewish Godfather!’ Silvia Moreno-Garcia ‘Maror blends the page-turning wit of a hard-boiled detective noir with the stirring intrigue of a multi-national political epic. An ambitious achievement that weaves a tapestry of both story and statement.’ Kevin Jared Hosein ‘Radiant with […] the richly nuanced complexity and style of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings … Will catch your breath as it presents the history of Israel from unique points of view, with dazzling multi-generational scope.’ LoveReading

The Best of World SF. Volume 1

Emma — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Twenty-six new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction.‘Rare and wonderful’ The Times ‘The most important anthology of SF short fiction since Dangerous Visions‘ Adam Roberts ‘Fizzes with great ideas and wonderful writing… Now this book exists, it feels absurd it didn’t exist sooner’ SFXThe future is coming. It knows no bounds, and neither should science fiction.They say the more things change the more they stay the same. But over the last hundred years, science fiction has changed. Vibrant new generations of writers have sprung up across the globe, proving the old adage false. From Ghana to India, from Mexico to France, from Singapore to Cuba, they draw on their unique backgrounds and culture, changing the face of the genre one story at a time.Prepare yourself for a journey through the wildest reaches of the imagination, to visions of Earth as it might be and the far corners of the universe. Along the way, you will meet robots and monsters, adventurers and time travellers, rogues and royalty.In The Best of World SF, award-winning author Lavie Tidhar acts as guide and companion to a world of stories, from never-before-seen originals to award winners, from twenty-three countries and seven languages. Because the future is coming and it belongs to us all.Stories:’Immersion’ by Aliette de Bodard; ‘Debtless’ by Chen Qiufan (trans. from Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks); ‘Fandom for Robots’ by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; ‘Virtual Snapshots’ by Tlotlo Tsamaase; ‘What The Dead Man Said’ by Chinelo Onwualu; ‘Delhi’ by Vandana Singh; ‘The Wheel of Samsara’ by Han Song (trans. from Chinese by the author); ‘Xingzhou’ by Yi-Sheng Ng; ‘Prayer’ by Taiyo Fujii (trans. from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski); ‘The Green Ship’ by Francesco Verso (trans. from Italian by Michael Colbert); ‘Eyes of the Crocodile’ by Malena Salazar Maciá (trans. from Spanish by Toshiya Kamei); ‘Bootblack’ by Tade Thompson; ‘The Emptiness in the Heart of all Things’ by Fabio Fernandes; ‘The Sun From Both Sides’ by R.S.A. Garcia; ‘Dump’ by Cristina Jurado (trans. from Spanish by Steve Redwood); ‘Rue Chair’ by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo (trans. from Spanish by the author); ‘His Master’s Voice’ by Hannu Rajaniemi; ‘Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys’ by Nir Yaniv (trans. from Hebrew by Lavie Tidhar); ‘The Cryptid’ by Emil H. Petersen (trans. from Icelandic by the author); ‘The Bank of Burkina Faso’ by Ekaterina Sedia; ‘An Incomplete Guide…’ by Kuzhali Manickavel; ‘The Old Man with The Third Hand’ by Kofi Nyameye; ‘The Green’ by Lauren Beukes; ‘The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir’ by Karin Tidbeck; ‘Prime Meridian’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia; ‘If At First You Don’t Succeed’ by Zen Cho

The Hood

Emma — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

God bless you, England, on this glorious Year of Our Lord, 1145.

Things are definitely not right in Nottingham. Rebecca, daughter of a Jewish money-lender, has a sense for it.

A mad monk schemes to resurrect the Christ from body parts. A bone harpist murders creatures of legend for a price. A fae creature binds its wings and embraces a new God and his son.

And don’t even mention the Hood. The Man in Green. The Prince of Thieves. The tick-tock taker of the ten-toll tax.

What hope have the series of sheriffs sent to hold the peace?

It’s the forest, you see. Sherwood. Ice Age ancient, impenetrable, hiding a dark and secret heart. But hearts, no matter how black, no matter how hidden, are not immune to change. The old world is dying… and a terrifying new one is waiting to take its place.

Rebecca senses an opportunity. But how far is she willing to go, and what price – because there is always a price – will she have to pay?

The Hood is Lavie Tidhar’s narcotic reweirding of an ancient English myth, a tale stitched together from legends lost to time, a tale told and retold, reworked and renewed for each passing century. A tale, reader, for today.

‘A wild, inventive tapestry of myth and magic, with a wry sense of humor. Tidhar’s writing is wonderfully vibrant’ Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic