Osama was the surprise winner of the 2012 World Fantasy award for best novel beating out both Stephen King and George R.R. Martin. Its premise involves a quest to find the writer of a series of pulp thrillers featuring a vigilante named Osama Bin-Laden. In Tidhar's alternate reality tale, we have a world in which there is no war on terror and no World Trade Center. Joe (just Joe) is a private investigator hired by a mysterious woman (Is there any other kind in this type of story?) to search and

Osama is one of those novels that keep on surprising me long into the reading. It FEELS like a noir with some really cool easter eggs. What sets this one apart from most noirs is the fact that this is in an alternate dimension.Coolness already. But when we're dealing with an easter egg like an enigmatic novel named Osama, based on a revolutionary vigilante hero Osama Bin Laden, things get... weird. Never too weird or too quick, this mystery only gets deeper and stranger when we dive into the wor...

It galls me to write this, because Lavie's a friend and frankly is unlikely to let me hear the end of it, but this is a seriously good book. Beautifully written, spare but not short or lightweight as I find some novels of this ilk are. It's an unsettling story reminiscent Paul Auster, but with substance in the place of narcissism. The PKD similarity is clear, but I was also put in mind of The City and the City; the ending of which I found a massive disappointment. Osama didn't disappoint and I t...

This is an interesting reaction to current events, digging down to mess about in the collective unconscious. There are some striking moments - the interstitial chapters describing terrorists balance journalistic precision with a poetic eye for detail and Joe's imprisonment by the mysterious CPD is rich with irony, taking the Man in the High Castle elements to a new level.I'd rate this one a 3 1/2 - I would like to have rated this thoughtful book higher, but some elements didn't quite gel for me....

I am having the hardest time processing this book.Basic plot?Joe is a detective. He's living and working in Laos when a mysterious woman comes to him and asks him to find an author. Someone who is writing about a fictional vigilante named Osama bin Laden. Chances are, if you've gotten to my review, you already know that.This world is an alternate reality (maybe). It's a very classic detective noir novel (maybe), with your typical cardboard cut out detective stereotype (maybe), and standard cardb...

It reads like a detective crime thriller with lots of clouds mishmashed together, all beyond any recognition. There are clouds of conspiracy theories, America's many insurgency plots, opium bars, sleazy hotels and a bit of Afghanistan which seems alien to the whole story. I expected Osama to emerge fro New York instead of Kabul. Maybe its just me with my Muslim background who expected some serious treatment of the 'War against terror' which has turned out to be a completely one way as far as the...

This is the book that won the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, beating out four other finalists, including my own first effort, Those Across the River. If only the rest of life's small disappointments seemed so just. Mine is a horror novel, and, I think, a good one-but this? Osama is a fable, an opium dream, a prose-poem, a meaningful contemplation on life's fragility and the absurdity of violence, containing perhaps the best articulation of Purgatory I have ever read. My favorite detail...

I've been avoiding reading Osama for a while, as I didn't really feel tempted by the summary, but I ended up picking it up in the library -- because that can never hurt! -- and really enjoying it, as it happens. Rather more than the books that Lavie Tidhar wrote for Angry Robot, actually, even though superficially they might seem more up my street.I think a fair amount of the trouble people have reading this is that they're expecting the wrong thing. A classically noirish detective story, a thri...

Detective noir with comic book flavor, hints of alternate worlds, a vein of historical journalism, and light, heart-tugging sentimentality. Better than any prime time comic news show, Tidhar brilliantly conveys just how ridiculous and pulpy our tragic violence might appear to a world without the GWoT, while at the same time levelling blame at the proper parties. Bravo!

I thought that this wonderful novel about our identities in this world will be more like The Man in the High Castle and less like Ubik, but it is the other way around and I like it. And fortunately, the writing is so much better than anything Philip K. Dick ever put on paper.

Spoilers, yo.The deliberate internet contrarians who are starting to pop up notwithstanding, I think the comparisons to The Man in the High Castle you see in many of the reviews here are dead on.Joe's reality at the beginning of the book has simply unraveled by the end of it, and if that ain't Dickian, I don't know what is.I enjoyed Osama more than I enjoy most of PKD's fiction, and the reason is interesting to me. Dick, for all the gobsmacking he does, for all the times when he turns the reader...

What I really dug about this book was the sense of diminishment it left me with: the diminishment of Osama as a man; the diminishment of Osama as an idea; the diminishment of the attack on the WTC; the diminishment of terrorism in general; the diminishment of the US government and its war machine; the diminishment of violence and our rationalized motivations for violence; the diminishment of humanity; the diminishment of our own little tragedies. And it did this while celebrating knowledge and l...

I discovered Lavie Tidhar’s work a year or two ago, and I have been making my way through his catalogue since, loving every minute of it. Granted, I am not reading his books in the chronological order in which they were published, and it gave me a few surprised. Such as “Osama”, the book that made Tidhar’s name by wining him the World Fantasy Award when it was finally published, leaving a few better known writers to eat his dust and wonder what had just happened.I was 17 when the planes hit the

Wishing Terrorism Was Only FictionMany people have compared the novel Osama by Lavie Tidhar to books by Phillip K. Dick. It is similar in that the main characters come to realize that reality is not at all what it seems, and that there are those who would stop them from learning the truth. However, Osama is much more beautifully written, and without the heightened paranoia of many of Dick’s works.This is not a difficult book to read, but it is a very difficult book to discuss. I finished it over...

Joe, a 40-something chain-smoking, hard-drinking private detective in provincial Vientiane in southeast Asia, is visited at his office by a mysterious woman, who hires him to find the author of a series of pulp novels about a terrorist vigilante, Osama bin Laden, and the truth lying behind them. Osama, as it turns out, has gained quite a cult following: in a world without war or global terrorism, where opium is legally smoked everywhere, a terrorist who blows up embassies and tube stations and c...

*review first appeared at skullsaladreviews.blogspot.com*In the interest of full disclosure, I admit Lavie's someone I know and interact with online. I received an electronic review copy straight from the author himself. That said, Tidhar's new novel, Osama (PS Publishing, 2011), is a difficult novel to review without spoilers. I will do my best here. But let me just say upfront that I loved, loved this book! Sometimes when getting a book from a friend or acquaintance, there's a hesitance to rev...

I really liked this book. It completely sucked me in. I read the last half in a single sitting.And, frankly, I have no idea what I just read. Maybe there's a part of me that doesn't grok the big picture metaphors going on in books (and it's why I hate critical literature) but I've been sitting here for an hour after I finished this book, and I still don't know what the hell happened.But I do know I enjoyed it quite a bit.Go figure.And "Mike Longshott" is a GREAT pseudonym for a purveyor of "terr...

This novel's actually between a 7 and an 8 out of 10 for me (as rated on my blog). I've given it 4 on GoodReads... I nearly didn't give it any stars at all - not because it doesn't deserve them, but because I can't make up my mind about it.It's an interesting, enigmatic, Noir-ish novel which is beautifully written. It reminded me a lot of some novels by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, particularly End of the World Blues (for some reason). At its most basic, it's an alternate history novel about a series...

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1891438.html[return][return][return][return]An alternate history novel where the War on Terror never happened, but instead the history of our world is experience in a series of pulp novels about Osama Bin Laden; the plot concerns the central character's quest for the author of these stories, which takes him on a long journey including a brief step into our timeline. So it's basically The Man In The High Castle recast for today, though with lots of added literary all...

Modernity, or post-modernity, or the difference, or whatever that thing we're in now is. Very precisely, very elegantly, theres an evocation of a stylized, graceful past, though the setting is nominally the present. A world of phone booths and opium dens, fedoras, travel agents, zippo lighters, Parisian cafes and London pubs populated by beautiful, sad eyed prostitutes where smoking indoors is always allowed. Cons where people still read mimeographed fanzines. Our world intrudes as a crude, poin...