Osama
core novel 2011 Osama
Record
| First published | 2011 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.47 (1,176 ratings, collected 2026-09-15) |
| Page count | 276 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781848631922 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Osama is set in an alternate world in which the acts of terrorism that define our own history's early twenty-first century never happened, and where the name Osama bin Laden is known to most people only as the villain of a series of lurid pulp thrillers. A private detective, Joe, is hired to track down Mike Longshott, the reclusive and possibly pseudonymous author of these popular Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante novels, whose violent plots seem to echo real-world atrocities that, in this timeline, never occurred. As Joe's search for the elusive author takes him across several countries, he begins to sense that the line between the pulp fiction he is investigating and the world he actually lives in is far less stable than it should be.
Where it sits
- Universe: Osama
- Series: Osama core; position 1 of 1 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Lavie Tidhar
Awards (verified)
- World Fantasy Award (Best Novel), 2012: won
Notes
- From the series record (Osama): Standalone novel; an alt-history noir in which a private detective investigates the mysterious pulp novelist behind a series of thrillers starring a terrorist named Osama bin Laden, in a world where the real-world 9/11 and its aftermath never happened. Lavie Tidhar's first universe in this canon; his separate The Violent Century is an unrelated work.
Sources
← Osama dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.