Osama

Description

Winner of the World Fantasy Award Tenth Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction and three extra stories. It's a rainy day when the woman approaches Joe. He is a private detective and she is looking for someone, as these things often go. Her quarry is the obscure author of a series of pulp novels featuring one Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. Joe's quest will take him across the world in search of the writer. And every step of the way - from the backwaters of Laos to Paris and London - he is plagued, by assailants he cannot name, by questions he cannot hope to answer and by ghostly entities he cannot seem to shake. Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he will find in New York and atop a quiet hill above Kabul, nor for the choice he will have to make there...

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award-winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut's by Locus.

Bears comparison with the best of Philip K. Dick's paranoid alternate-history fantasies. It's beautifully written and undeniably powerful * Financial Times * Osama is an ingenious inversion of modern history: Osama bin Laden is the central character in a string of pulp novels allegedly written by one Mike Longschott. The terrorist crimes exist, in this novel, in a different realm... Excellent, evocative and atmospheric' -- Christopher Priest, award-winning novelist and author of The Prestige An awesome book, dark, twisty alt-universe terrorist noir -- Lauren Beukes, bestselling author of Zoo City