Synopses & Reviews
They never meant to be heroes. For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart. But there must always be an account...and the past has a habit of catching up to the present. Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism, - a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields - to answer one last, impossible question: What makes a hero?
Review
Praise for THE VIOLENT CENTURY: “Pack your bags and go home; the superhero genre is now completed... if John le Carre wrote a superhero novel about the Cold War, it
might be this good.”
- Charles Stross, author of Neptune's Brood: A Space Opera
“A stunning masterpiece” - The Independent “Tidhar synthesises the geeky and the political in a vision of world events that breaks new superhero ground …" - The Guardian “Hes dealing with the grandest schemes on the largest of backdrops in time and place... no longer an emerging writer, but a master.” - British Fantasy Society “Its the X-Men as written by John le Carré … A love story and meditation on heroism, this is an elegiac espionage adventure that demands a second reading.” - Metro (UK) “The sort of thing Quentin Tarantino did as bloody wish-fulfillment in Inglourious Basterds, multiplied by several orders of magnitude.” - Locus
About the Author
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), and of The Violent Century (2013) in addition to many other works. 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 Vonneguts by Locus.