The new UK paperback edition of GOLGOTHA, the conclusion to Lavie Tidhar‘s internationally-acclaimed Maror trilogy, is out tomorrow! Published by Apollo/Head of Zeus, here’s the synopsis…

Two men, decades apart, are ensnared in the deadly search for a fabled treasure in the conclusion to Lavie Tidhar’s epic and audacious Maror Trilogy.

1882, Jerusalem
The foreigner. A man with no name, twin guns at his hips, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. A European exile in the backwaters of Ottoman Palestine, The foreigner is a bounty hunter in pursuit of a thief.

1948, Haifa
Burton. A man with one name, a detective inspector in the crumpled khaki uniform of the Palestine Police Force’s CID. With just seven days before the British Mandate ends, he must find a murderer and a missing aristocrat, as order collapses around him.

Both men are outsiders in a land that is a palimpsest of ruins and loyalties, legacy of a history written in blood on a landscape that remembers everything. Both men will treat with bandits and mystics, dreamers and killers as they pursue their quarry; both will be ensnared in a lethal search for the fabled treasures of the Second Temple, long-lost amid the rise and fall of peoples, nations and empires. And both will be haunted by their dreams: burning red skies, a mountain of skulls, echoes of a vision from the dawn of humanity.

Before Jerusalem, before Jericho, there has always been Golgotha.

Here are just a few of the great reviews the novel has received so far…

‘A searing portrait of history as both knife and the longing heart it seeks. Tidhar’s best.’ — Junot Díaz

‘Tidhar’s accomplished scene-setting conjures up a long-vanished world on the cusp of conflict – one that continues to this day’ — Financial Times

‘[A] bawdy tale of adventurers, poets, lovers and fighters in the Holy Land, as two men go in search of mythical treasures while the fury of war envelops the land. Polyphonic, epic, featuring memorable if two-faced characters and with a sweeping narrative in fifth gear, this is a hell of way to complete the trilogy and met all my high expectations.’ — Crime Time

‘The feel and senses of this complicated world come vividly to life, and you can almost smell the hot sand and sun-baked goats. Twists and turns abound, and the body count mounts up – as it continues to do today unfortunately in this contested place. Perhaps the treasure we seek should be the ability to co-exist together even when we are from different peoples, tribes, religions, etc., and this could be seen as one of the key themes of the novel.’ — Historical Novels Society Magazine

The first two novels in the award-winning trilogy — MAROR and ADAMA — are out now, also published by Apollo/Head of Zeus. The trilogy has also been published in Germany, by Suhrkamp.

Here are some reviews for the first two books in the series…

‘A masterpiece of the sacred and the profane … a literary triumph.’ — Guardian on MAROR

‘Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness… Fade[s] into oblivion compared with Lavie Tidhar’s magnificent novel MAROR, a panoramic look at four decades of the dark, despicable side of Israel, of death, corruption, violence and drugs… It’s a brilliant undertaking.’ — Jewish Chronicle

‘This is crime writing in the tradition of Balzac and Dickens and a major achievement, full of sound, fury, drugs and blood… An earthquake of a book.’ — Crime Time on MAROR

‘MAROR is a profane, irreverent, scathing, sometimes blackly humorous and often compassionate fever-dream history of Israel… possibly his best yet.’ — NewTown Review of Books

‘The prolific Tidhar has previously stuck to science fiction, but he is fast emerging as the leader of a new wave of Israeli literature, thanks to his risky, exhilarating experiments with tone and genre… ADAMA, which means ‘land’ in Hebrew (although ‘dam’ means blood) reaches further back, to pre-state Palestine and its displaced persons camps, through the story of Ruth, whose family escaped the Nazis in Budapest and who spends much of her life on a kibbutz… in Tidhar’s hands the kibbutz is no rose-tinted utopian community, but a harbinger of savage dislocation and violence. It’s not an easy read, but Tidhar’s imagination is both Old Testament through and through, and sick with a 21st-century disenchantment.’ — Daily Mail

‘ADAMA is the second in an ambitious trilogy about the tumultuous birth of Israel, but can be read as a standalone. It is a brilliantly unsentimental portrayal, full of moral murkiness and tarnished hopes, with small, half-glimpsed bursts of joy.’ — The Times (UK), Best Historical Fiction of the Month

‘A novel of immense power that resists easy answers to difficult questions.’ — The Times on ADAMA

‘Word by word I was drawn deeper and deeper into this incredible book – a story of inheritance, loss, longing and what could have been. Lavie Tidhar’s prose is beautiful, his characters lacerating and heartbreaking by turns. I loved it.’ — Catriona Ward on ADAMA