A Man Lies Dreaming

In his World Fantasy Award winning novel Osama, Lavie Tidhar turned Osama bin Laden into the hero of a series of pulp noir novels in an alternate version of our present. Now he has pulled off a very similar trick with the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, a one-time pulp novelist dreams a series of stories as a way of retaining his sanity in this mad world. In the stories he dreams, Hitler never came to power and instead works as a private detective in 1930s London. Hired by a Jewish woman to find her missing sister he enters a steamy underworld of white slavery and casual torture, all the time spouting anti-Semitic remarks while doing good almost by accident. Why it's on the list: This is a tricky balancing act, between the deeply serious and disturbing reality of the concentration camps on the one hand, and the garish, violent world of pulp fiction, but Tidhar carries it off triumphantly.