For seventy years they'd guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable at first, bound together by a shared fate. Until a 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.
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?
Industry Reviews
Provides an insight into what it takes to be human, and what can happen when we lay that humanity aside. It's a powerful novel, which will no doubt reward rereading. * Sci-Fi bulletin * A love story and meditation on heroism, this is an elegiac espionage adventure that demands a second reading. * Metro * Tidhar has written a fantastic novel... I can't wait to read Osama and anything else of his that I can get my hands on... Definitely recommended. * Civilian Reader * Dig it, kats and kittens: THE VIOLENT CENTURY is a brilliantly etched phantasmagoric reconfiguring of that most sizzling of eras - the twilight 20th. Lavie Tidhar lays it out like a dystopian dog!!! This book has it ALL: time travel, political intrigue, hellacious history itself!!! You've got superheroes in the guise of regular humans, you've got World War II!!! Viva Lavie Tidhar - "The Violent Century" is a torrid tour de force!!!!! * James Ellroy * An alternative history tour-de-force. Epic, intense and authentic. Lavie Tidhar reboots the 20th century with spies and superheroes battling for mastery - and the results are electric. -- Tom Harper, author of THE ORPHEUS DESCENT * blurb * vintage Lavie, and also I think his most fully accomplished novel yet. Nobody rides that fast-rolling wave separating schlocky pulp and serious literary sensibilities so deftly as Tidhar. He manages to make serious points about the benighted twentieth-century and its obsession with 'supermen' without ever letting the narrative slacken or the adventure pale. If Nietzche had written an X-Men storyline whilst high on mescaline, it might have read something like VIOLENT CENTURY. -- Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass * blurb * Where do heroes come from? How are friendships made? What makes us human? These are the questions that Lavie Tidhar grapples with, in this story of friendship writ large upon a canvas that stretches from the 1930s to the present day, in a slightly alternate world where superheroes exists, but heroics mean different things to different people. Choices made in the second world war resonate down through a series of brilliantly detailed cold war scenes, ultimately wrestling with the idea of the self. This is a big, ambitious book that manages to deliver. -- Glen Mehn * http://glen.mehn.net/2013/08/100-word-review-the-violent-century-by-lavie-tidhar/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=100-word-review-the-violent-century-by-lavie-tidhar * He is a political writer, an iconoclast and sometimes a provocateur ... Osama is a remarkable and ambitious work. * China Mieville on Osama. * Young, ambitious, skilled and original. * Christopher Priest, author of The Prestige. * An emerging master." * Locus *
