A Man Lies Dreaming

by Lavie Tidhar

Overview

THE CULT NOVEL RETURNS!

“The best book I read last year is A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar... It is so cleverly constructed and such a spectacular conclusion unfolds that you are going to take it all very seriously.” – Sting

“Ambitious as hell” –Ian Rankin

“An excellent novel” –Philip Kerr

Since its original 2014 publication, A Man Lies Dreaming has been translated into multiple languages and gained a cult following for its dark humor, prescient politics and powerful exploration of the impossibility of fantasy.

1939: Adolf Hitler, fallen from power, seeks refuge in a London engulfed in the throes of a very British Fascism. Now eking a miserable living as a down-at-heels private eye and calling himself Wolf, he has no choice but to take on the case of a glamorous Jewish heiress whose sister went missing.

It’s a decision Wolf will very shortly regret.

For in another time and place a man lies dreaming: Shomer, once a Yiddish pulp writer, who dreams lurid tales of revenge in the hell that is Auschwitz.

Prescient, darkly funny and wholly original, the award-winning A Man Lies Dreaming is a modern fable for our time that comes “crashing through the door of literature like Sam Spade with a .38 in his hand” (Guardian).

PRAISE FOR LAVIE TIDHAR

Winner – The World Fantasy Award
Winner – The John W. Campbell Award
Winner – The British Fantasy Award
Winner – The Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize
Winner – The Neukom Literary Arts Award
Winner – The Kitschies Award
Winner – The BSFA Award

“Tidhar is a genius at conjuring realities that are just two steps to the left of our own.” –NPR
“Tidhar changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.” –Library Journal
“In a genre entirely of his own, and quite possibly a warped genius.” –Ian McDonald, author of River of Gods
“Already staked a claim as the genre’s most interesting, most bold, and most accomplished writer.” –Locus
“Tidhar is a master at taking concepts that really shouldn’t work and crafting them into something uniquely brilliant.” –GeekDad
“He is perhaps the UK’s most literary speculative fiction writer.” –Strange Horizons
“Like early Kurt Vonnegut… both writers seem to channel the same prankster glee that covers deep despair.” –Locus
“Bears comparison with the best of Philip K Dick” –The Financial Times

PRAISE FOR A MAN LIES DREAMING

JERWOOD FICTION UNCOVERED PRIZE WINNER 2015
BRITISH FANTASY AWARD NOMINEE 2015
PREMIO ROMA NOMINEE 2016
GEFFEN PRIZE NOMINEE 2019
DUBLIN LITERATURE AWARD LONGLIST 2016

“Complex, elusive and intriguing” –The Jerusalem Post
“Nasty, clever, waspish and witty… a brilliant and potent thought experiment” –The Sunday Herald
“Bold and unnerving” –NPR
“Damn good” –Jewish Book Council
“A wholly original Holocaust story: as outlandish as it is poignant.” –Kirkus (starred review)
“A vital, brilliant novel” –Barnes & Noble SFF Blog
“Outstanding and moving” –Maxim Jakubowski, LoveReading.co.uk
“Gripping… clever and thrilling work” –Buzz Magazine
“In turns brutal, harrowing, heartbreaking and intriguing…. [an] unforgettable novel.” –Gulf Weekly
“Poetic & terrible… quite incredible” –Tor.com
“A brilliant novel.” –Pop Verse

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625675224
Publisher:	JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is author of Osama, The Violent Century, A Man Lies Dreaming, Central Station, and Unholy Land, as well as the Bookman Histories trilogy. His latest novels are By Force Alone, children’s book The Candy Mafia and comics mini-series Adler. His awards include the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Neukom Prize and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.

Editorial Reviews

03/14/2016
Even devoted fans of revisionist fiction might blanche at the premise of Tidhar's latest, which supposes that the National Socialists lost their bid for Germany in 1933, after which the country fell into the hands of Jewish Communists in an event known as the Fall. Now it's 1939 and an underworld of ex-Nazis has taken root in London, where they are essentially an oppressed minority. One of their number is Wolf, a hard-bitten detective with a mysterious past, who breaks his rule against taking on Jewish clients to locate a beautiful woman's missing sister. Soon Wolf is enmeshed in the search for a murderer, uncovering a conspiracy with links to the identity he left behind in Nuremberg and will go to any length to keep hidden. And then there are the dreams that haunt Wolf: dreams of a man named Shomer, a prisoner in a concentration camp who himself dreams of another world. This sounds provocative and transgressive, but the execution is strictly by the numbers. The noir elements are deadeningly predictable and Wolf's investigation quickly turns into a game of spot-the-historical-figure. This is a toothless exercise of What If topped with a trite twist. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

• Winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize
• Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award
• A Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of the Year
• A Scotland Herald Best Crime Novel of the Year

“Stunning...very funny...remarkably poignant...[Tidhar] reminds us that even — especially — under the most terrible of circumstances, stories are all we have. And in the right hands, they can be a formidable weapon.”
—The Washington Post

“Bold and unnerving…A Man Lies Dreaming is a book of big ideas, from the pathological origins of racist ideology to the way humanizing and dehumanizing those we love or loathe are flip sides of the same coin.”
—NPR

“It’s caustic. It’s risky. The unexpected thing about the book is this: It’s good. It’s damn good.”—Jewish Book Council

“[A Man Lies Dreaming] blends two venerable genres — alternative history and noir mystery, with Hitler playing the gumshoe. Though this seems like a stretch, Tidhar makes it work. In keeping with the conventions of the genre, his writing is clipped and precise, but colorful enough to reinvigorate familiar tropes.”
—The Forward


“A daring work, briskly paced and impossible to set down.”—ALIVE Magazine

“Quite literally took my breath away.”
—Cleaver Magazine

“Everything in this genre-bender works; intriguing historical characters are worked into expertly managed plots, and the visceral noir atmosphere is juxtaposed nicely against the drawing-room world of London’s political scene.”
—Booklist, starred review

“A wholly original Holocaust story: as outlandish as it is poignant.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“Brilliant . . . Shocking . . . A twisted masterpiece . . . A Holocaust novel like no other, Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming comes crashing through the door of literature like Sam Spade with a .38 in his hand.”
—The Guardian

“Theodor Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. To which I would say, yes, but you can still write an excellent novel. A Man Lies Dreaming is that novel.”
—Philip Kerr

“Readers may quickly get used to being ashamed of their laughter, but they may find it more unsettling to discover that their compassion feels equally transgressive . . . Weird, upsetting, unmissable.”
—Telegraph (★★★★★)

“A sort of Holocaust noir or pulp that is at once as riveting as it is disturbing . . . There is eloquence and gravitas in the sparseness and brevity of noir fiction when it is good, and Tidhar's is quite incredible.”
—Tor.com

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2016
How do you make sense of the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of so many people for the sole fact of belonging to a different tribe? World Fantasy Award winner Tidhar's (Osama) answer is to create a world of his own and place Adolf Hitler smack dab in the middle of it. The Communists win in Germany in 1933 and Hitler flees. In 1939, now named Wolf, he's a none-too-successful private eye operating out of a rundown office in a neighborhood populated by losers and whores in London. Oswald Mosley's fascist Blackshirts roam the streets terrorizing people: Mosley is about to be elected prime minister. Then a beautiful woman approaches the failed führer and asks him to locate her missing sister. Mosley wants Wolf to find out who's behind assassination attempts against him. Meanwhile, in Wolf's neighborhood, someone is killing prostitutes. Elsewhere, in Auschwitz, Shomer dreams, talks to the dead, anything to numb his thinking of his own loss. The two narratives merge in a Chandler-esque mystery, which is also a lurid S&M thriller and a jarring tale of a grim, gray alternative world. VERDICT Seldom will readers come across fantasy as well conceived and well written as this exceptional novel, a 2015 winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Library Journal

★ 2015-12-23
A down-on-his-luck Hitler, now working as a private detective in London, searches for a missing Jewish girl in this wild, noir-infused alternative history from genre-bender Tidhar (Osama, 2011, etc.) After the communists take over Germany in the early 1930s, the one-time leader of the National Socialists, now calling himself Wolf, escapes to London, where he tweaks his appearance ever so slightly ("He could no longer abide the moustache") and sets up shop as a gumshoe. His need for cash supersedes his virulent anti-Semitism, and soon he's in the employ of Isabella Rubinstein ("a tall drink of pale milk"), on the hunt for her sister, who was smuggled out of Germany by ex-Nazis but seems to have vanished. If the proceedings sound pulpish, it's because they're the imaginings of Shomer, once a "purveyor of Yiddish shund"—lowbrow detective stories and the like—now a prisoner at Auschwitz. Tidhar deftly shifts between these two worlds, dedicating the majority of the novel to Wolf's "fictional" London of 1939 but also illuminating Shomer's horrible reality, all the while crafting a mystery that is absorbing in its own right. As Wolf hunts for the girl, he begins to investigate his former associates, and Tidhar has good fun populating the story with real-life characters whose lives have taken unexpected turns: Hermann Göring is now "a simple pimp," Leni Riefenstahl works for Warner Bros. The presence of a Hitler-obsessed serial killer and Wolf's association with Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist now running for prime minister, keep things moving. The story isn't for the weak of heart: Tidhar/Shomer revels in describing Wolf's sexual proclivities, and at least one torture scene won't be easy for readers to forget. But though at times the narrative feels almost farcical, Shomer's presence imbues it with unexpected weight, resulting in an ending that is more gut punch than punch line. A wholly original Holocaust story: as outlandish as it is poignant.

Kirkus Reviews