What if your friend was murdered and the police wouldn't investigate? Israel, 1950 - When private detective Adam Lapid runs into Yosef Kaplon on a crowded Tel Aviv street, he can hardly believe his eyes. The last time they met was in Auschwitz. They were prisoners together in the same barracks. Then one day, Kaplon was gone. Adam was sure he was dead. Soon after Kaplon tells Adam his remarkable story of survival, he's found dead in his apartment. The police say it was suicide, but Adam isn't so sure. He decides to investigate the matter himself. In a twisting case that takes him from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Adam must follow a winding trail of clues to uncover the shocking solution to the mystery. Did Kaplon really take his own life? Or has Adam stumbled on the trail of a serial killer who is hunting a unique sort of victim?
On the dusty streets of post-war Tel Aviv, a crafty killer roams free... Israel, 1949 - Private detective Adam Lapid knows how it feels to lose everything. His whole family died in Auschwitz. He barely survived. Now he spends his nights haunted by nightmares and his days solving cases the police won't handle. Hired to find a missing boy, Adam thinks the case is hopeless. But he can't turn down a mother searching for her only child. What Adam doesn't realize is that this case will soon put him in mortal danger. For at the root of the mystery lies a double murder that has stayed unsolved for ten long years. Adam must untangle a web of lies and betrayal to get to the truth. And he'd better watch his back because some of the suspects are willing to kill to keep their dark secrets buried.
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 눀
What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective dad you knew . . . or thought you knew? Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As he uncovered documents the Nazis didn’t burn, however, another man emerged—a black market ringleader and wily camp survivor who made his own luck. The tattered papers also shed light on painful secrets his father took to his grave. Melding the intimacy of personal memoir with the rigors of investigative journalism, What They Didn’t Burn is a heartwarming, inspiring story of resilience and redemption. A story of how desperate survivors turned hopeful refugees rebuilt their shattered lives in America, all the while struggling with the lingering trauma that has impacted their children to this day.
Meet Aimée Leduc, the smart, stylish Parisian private investigator, in her bestselling first investigation Aimée Leduc has always sworn she would stick to tech investigation—no criminal cases for her. Especially since her father, the late police detective, was killed in the line of duty. But when an elderly Jewish man approaches Aimée with a top-secret decoding job on behalf of a woman in his synagogue, Aimée unwittingly takes on more than she is expecting. She drops off her findings at her client’s house in the Marais, Paris’s historic Jewish quarter, and finds the woman strangled, a swastika carved on her forehead. With the help of her partner, René, Aimée sets out to solve this horrendous murder, but finds herself in an increasingly dangerous web of ancient secrets and buried war crimes.
In this astonishing story that “reads like a thriller and is so, so timely” (BuzzFeed) Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: “Like Anne Frank’s diary, it offers a story that needs to be told and heard” (Booklist, starred review). In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened. When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated, and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined. A “beautifully told story of personal discovery” (John le Carré), When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life, and this “gripping, expertly researched narrative will inspire those looking to uncover their own family histories” (Publishers Weekly).
Few growing up in the aftermath of World War II will ever forget the horrifying reports that Nazi concentration camp doctors had removed the skin of prison ers to make common, everyday lampshades. In The Lampshade, bestselling journalist Mark Jacobson tells the story of how he came into possession of one of these awful objects, and of his search to establish the origin, and larger meaning, of what can only be described as an icon of terror. From Hurricane Katrina–ravaged New Orleans to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to the Buchenwald concentration camp to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, almost everything Jacobson uncovers about the lampshade is contradictory, mysterious, shot through with legend and specious information. Through interviews with forensic experts, famous Holocaust scholars (and deniers), Buchenwald survivors and liberators, and New Orleans thieves and cops, Jacobson gradually comes to see the lampshade as a ghostly illuminator of his own existential status as a Jew, and to understand exactly what that means in the context of human responsibility. One question looms as his search progresses: what to do with the lampshade—this unsettling thing that used to be someone?
Surveying irreverent and controversial representations of the Holocaust - from Sylvia Plath and the Sex Pistols to Quentin Tarantino and Holocaust comedy - Matthew Boswell considers how they might play an important role in shaping our understanding of the Nazi genocide and what it means to be human.
“Blending elements of memoir, history, and biography,” the son of a Holocaust survivor “portrays the horrifying reality of the . . . concentration camps” (Midwest Book Review). In June 1944, the Nazis locked eighteen-year-old Dave Hersch into a railroad boxcar and shipped him from his hometown of Dej, Hungary, to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, the harshest, cruelest camp in the Reich. After ten months in the granite mines of Mauthausen’s nearby sub-camp, Gusen, he weighed less than 80lbs, nothing but skin and bones. Somehow surviving the relentless horrors of these two brutal camps, as Allied forces drew near Dave was forced to join a death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp, over thirty miles away. Soon after the start of the march, and more dead than alive, Dave summoned a burst of energy he did not know he had and escaped. Quickly recaptured, he managed to avoid being killed by the guards. Put on another death march a few days later, he achieved the impossible: he escaped again. Using only his father’s words for guidance, Jack Hersch takes us along as he flies to Europe to learn the secrets his father never told of his time in the camps. Beginning in the verdant hills of his father’s Hungarian hometown, we accompany Jack’s every step as he describes the unimaginable: what his father must have seen and felt while struggling to survive in the most abominable places on earth. “This deeply personal and extremely informative portrait of a man of indomitable will to live, as Hersch emphasizes, reminds us of why we must never forget nor trivialize the full, shocking truth about the Holocaust.”—Booklist
