Recommendations from our site
“This is my favourite recent alternate history. It’s set in the 1980s in a world where a whole bunch of argumentative Jews have been settled in Alaska to get them out of Germany during the Second World War. Michael Chabon, the author, used it to find a place where Yiddish would be a living language…Chabon is just such a marvellous writer.” Read more...
“There is a small but important subgenre of alternate Israel novels…In this one, in Chabon’s telling, it’s Alaska. It’s given over to the world’s Jews as a homeland but on a 50-year lease. The novel is set on the eve of the handback, so imagine Hong Kong in 1997. The protagonist is a policeman—not an unlicensed policeman, an actual policeman—trying to solve a murder on which the actual police authority has effectively given up, on the eve of the state’s dissolution. The murder is bound up with the overall project of pursuing a Jewish homeland, the contradictions and complexities of Zionism, its militaristic arm, its socialist arm, and the questions of what Jewish identity are.” Read more...
Cory Doctorow, Novelist
