Maror

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He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu. Some of the events are barely relevant to the narrative but they seem to have been included simply because the author enjoyed retelling them. Finally, it's worth mentioning that I'm not sure how much of this book will be accessible to people who don't know Israel or indeed its underbelly. From here Tidhar makes bold leaps in time and space in a broad narrative on the pragmatism of power.

Through a variety of interconnected characters, spanning time and place, Tidhar takes us on a journey not only through Israel's criminal underworld, but across Israel's history itself. And the noir form excels in taking us to root causes: the corruption of power and the chaos that it engenders. Avi does remarkable work, leading to the killing and arrest of important suspects, but then he goes even further, realizing in the end that Cohen himself has had the bomb set off not to kill Rubenstein but to kill the girl who can then be an organ donor to his desperately ill granddaughter. In Lavie Tidhar’s Maror, the latest troubled topography to get the noir treatment is the state of Israel, in a sprawling epic set across four decades, and an audacious account of the underbelly of nation-building.Maror is the story of a war for a country’s soul – a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. A confession is beaten out of the wrong suspect, a serial killer goes free, and a mood of cynicism sets in.

You know sometimes people describe a book as "chick lit" and I hate to see that used in a disparaging way. Little nods to his SF sneak in; a bookseller who mostly makes his money from drugs nowadays has a picture on his wall of the Central Station which, in Tidhar's book of the same name, was actually built – and I feel like the bookseller himself may also have cropped up in that book and/or Unholy Land. The blurb said it would appeal to fans of The White Tiger which I love but it's a very different type of book.And Tidhar, born in a kibbutz but now living in London, has turned his attention away from his favoured sci-fi and fantasy to examine the soul of Israel. I fully admit that my knowledge of Israel and its history is lacking and I therefore found myself learning throughout this novel.

Either way, if you have any interest in Israel as a nation, or just like the author's style, it's a must read. Visitaremos Los Ángeles cuando la cocaína era abiertamente consumida, la jungla colombiana con tropas de las FARC siendo entrenadas por policías israelíes, o entraremos en el Líbano para resolver un problema inmobiliario.

The only thing beside that omission that let it down for me was the ending, which although it made sense and closed out the novel and its threads, felt not lacking - so as much as it could have been more?