This is the first long-form novel I had read by the author and the short-stories I encountered were from the scifi/fantasy genre. He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! It's a harrowing passage, another trial for the young Avi, and a harbinger of the events later that year. In the midst of his ecstasy trip Avi meets the serpent in Eden and sees Cohen as the “Great Priest of Israel”.

I happen to know it, and found the book easy to follow and understand, identifying the real events that inspired the episodes in the book. Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), tracing his own biography and what it was like to live under the British mandate, was one. Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995, gets a particularly hard time, portrayed as a more or less permanent drunk. Secondly - and this is absolutely not Tidhar's fault - the amount of mistakes in the text was unforgivable. With an explosive climax to rival the last scenes of The Godfather 1, and superb world-building, Maror deserves a Pulitzer every bit as much as, if not more than, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.Maror is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece, immense in its sympathies, alarming in its irreverences and altogether exhilarating. Cohen is never our viewpoint character, we waft in and out of the stories of other cops, journalists, criminals, and in one notable segment an actress cum drill instructor cum drug dealer.

Through a variety of interconnected characters, spanning time and place, Tidhar takes us on a journey not only through Israel's criminal underworld, but across Israel's history itself. Exposition is achieved by stealth, for example describing three people that walk past to show the diversity of the place.

This is the first fifty pages of the book, and suddenly we are whipped thirty years back in time to the early seventies were Cohen is a fresh-faced cop and there might be a serial killer on the loose. I’m still digesting the many strands of the story and think it’ll require a re-read to fully appreciate the wealth of characters and events, most of which actually happened. Here we get an episodic, not-quite-linear story of several loosely connected figures over a 35 year period who represent a coarsening – if not deadening – of the dream of Israel as a nation founded on idealism. I feel though that the best way to describe where this book fits is "man lit" Maybe I just don't have the means to appreciate men shooting other men in the back of the head at regular intervals.

Maror' is the story of a war for the soul of Israel - a dazzling spread of narrative gunshots across four decades and three continents. The one constant thread uniting all the many disparate threads is the unsavoury character of Cohen, and I couldn’t relate to him at all. While I understand the choice to do it this way, I also can't but feel that something is missing for me in giving the entire narrative more purpose and more closure.It was, Tidhar reminds us, the admired poet Hayim Nahman Bialik who first declared in the 1920s that the Jews would know that their dream of a nation state had been fulfilled when there were Jewish prostitutes, Jewish thieves and a Jewish police force. The only thing beside that omission that let it down for me was the ending, which although it made sense and closed out the novel and its threads, felt not lacking - so as much as it could have been more? Her nickname is a pop culture reference, and the novel is full of Israeli pop culture references which anchor its many stories - strewn between 1974 and 2008 - to their times.