Synopses & Reviews
LATE EXTRA!BOMB OUTRAGE IN LONDON!
A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees -- there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack.
For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself...
Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure. The Bookman is the first of a series.
File Under: Steampunk [ Alternate History! | Reptilian Royalty! | Diabolical Anarchists! | Extraordinary Adventure! ]
Synopsis
This edition of The Bookman is now out of print. The ebook (
About the Author
Israeli-born writer Lavie Tidhar has been called an "emerging master" by
Locus magazine, and has quickly established a name for himself as a short fiction writer of some note. He has traveled widely, living variously in South Africa, the UK, Asia and the remote island-nation of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, and his work exhibits a strong sense of place and an engagement with the literary Other in all its forms.
Lavie's novella An Occupation of Angels was published in 2005, a Cold War fantasy thriller described by Michael Marshall Smith as "stunningly imaginative" and "the most compelling thing I have read in a long time". In linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007), Tidhar set out to re-imagine traditional fantasy tropes with a distinctly Jewish slant and rich historical settings, including a tale of the little-known Zionist expedition to British East Africa in search of a possible Jewish homeland in "Uganda", effortlessly mixing fact and fiction. The collection was described by Adam Roberts as containing "intensified supernatural action-surrealism" full of "conceptual surprise" and "saturated with a sense of exotic roundedness, an eerie solidity and reality." The author lives in Israel.