Unholy Land

4.5 out of 5 stars

Unholy Land is a stunning achievement. It is packed to the brim with engaging ideas and features a captivating story that I could not stop puzzling over. It will certainly find itself in my Top 10 of 2018 when the year comes to a close.

In the early 20th century, a group of expeditioners traveled to the border of Uganda to inspect a piece of land that was under consideration as a potential site for a Jewish homeland. This site had no holy significance, which made it a difficult sell to “Holy Landers” who considered settling in then-Ottoman Palestine to be a more appropriate choice. Unholy Land explores an alternate history where Jewish settlement in Africa had occurred, as well as the otherworldly borders that came to surround such a place.

I can't say more about the plot without taking away from what I found to be a marvelous reading experience. There is such an ethereal and intoxicating quality to the story and Tidhar's writing that I found myself floating through the chapters, not always sure what was happening, or whose perspective we were seeing, but knowing that I wanted to keep reading. The intersecting story threads twisted my brain into a pretzel and I loved it.

Having never read any other work by author Lavie Tidhar, I was blown away by his command of language — every sight, smell, and feeling of a scene is accounted for and communicated in vivid detail. On prose alone, I would have enjoyed this book, but pairing such good writing with such a conceptually intriguing story made for truly enjoyable reading. I look forward to exploring Tidhar's other works and I hope he continues to write beautiful and thought-provoking speculative fiction.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

This strange and convoluted novel might be the closest that you can get to understanding how expat Israelis feel about Israel – it forces you into a vantage point from which multiple points of view, truths and realities cohere.

As an immigrant myself, I really liked the idea of forgetting the details of previous your life once you've crossed the border between worlds, and comfortably making home in a different reality, complete with an alternative history and geopolitics.

I'm still not quite sure why the author made some of the decisions he made. While I get why each character's POV would be written in a different person, I struggle to see why the inspector character, the only one written in first person, would have access to other characters' feelings and perspective – it was a bit jarring and made the story that much harder to follow, and in the end wasn't explained (unless I missed something).