A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar’s noir take on the Holocaust, in which a concentration-camp prisoner imagines an alternative world where Adolf Hitler is a private detective in London, has been shortlisted for the best fantasy novel prize in the British Fantasy Awards.
Described by Adam Roberts in the Guardian as “a twisted masterpiece” that “manages to provide both the guilty pleasures of a fast-paced violent pulp and the more thoughtful moral depth of a genuine engagement with what the camps meant”, Tidhar’s book has already won the author a £5,000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize. Now Tidhar, whose novel Osama took the World Fantasy Award, is up against five other writers for the British Fantasy award for best novel. The prize has been running since 1972, and has been won in the past by Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, Stephen King, Gene Wolfe and Ramsey Campbell.
The shortlist, announced this morning, pits A Man Lies Dreaming against KT Davies’s Breed, about a quest to find the hammer of an ancient hero, Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs, which sees a diplomat murdered in a city where the gods have been destroyed; Neil Williamson’s The Moon King, set in a world where the moon has been tethered to a city; and Edward Cox’s The Relic Guild, in which a young girl touched by magic struggles to survive in a city where the use of magic is a capital offence.
Children’s author Frances Hardinge also makes the cut for Cuckoo Song, in which an 11-year-old girl almost drowns in a mill pond, only to wake in a world where everything, even her family, is not quite as it should be, and a voice in her head is counting down the days to her death. Annabel Pitcher in the Guardian called it “a deliciously dark and dangerous concoction that casts a bewitching spell”.
Competing for the best horror novel prize, meanwhile, are titles including Emily St John Mandel’s Arthur C Clarke award-winning story of a world devastated by a global pandemic, Station Eleven, and MR Carey’s twist on the zombie novel, The Girl With All the Gifts.
The shortlists are decided by a vote from members of the British Fantasy Society and those attending FantasyCon, with juries able to add any “egregious omissions” to the selection. The juries then choose their winners, which will be announced in October at FantasyCon in Nottingham.
- This article was amended on July 27 2015 to clarify the description of KT Davies’s Breed.
