"Traversing decades, this heart-stopping finale to a visionary historic crime trilogy is a gritty, compelling accomplishment."
Concluding the Maror trilogy that began with Maror and Adama, Lavie Tidhar's Golgotha further confirms the author’s uncanny talent for bridging genres while also breaking boundaries — Tidhar never fails to defy expectations, conjuring characters, worlds and stories that that meld weighty literary and historic themes with the pace and pull of a crime mystery thriller.
In the case of Golgotha, two men separated by time and place are united by a search for the same fabled treasure of the Second Temple, and by the fact that they’re both outsiders. In Jerusalem, 1882, a nameless man known as “foreigner” is tasked with finding a man who stole an item of importance from a man of powerful importance. Decades later, in Haifa in 1948, a detective of the Palestine Police Force is tasked with tracking down a missing murderer as the British Mandate for Palestine is about to end.
And all this in the frenetic wake of Golgotha’s arresting Prologue. Set in 80,000 BCE, this sees Eve watch over her sleeping son, imagining the day “he’d grow tall and strong, and find a wife who might be of Eve’s tribe or might be of the others, and they’d have children of their own; until there were not two kinds of people but just one” — a fittingly powerful way to set up an arresting novel that brings an extraordinary three-book sequence to a thought-provoking finale.
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Other Genres: |
Two men, decades apart, are ensnared in the deadly search for a fabled treasure in the conclusion to Lavie Tidhar's epic and audacious Maror Trilogy.
1882, Jerusalem
The foreigner. A man with no name, twin guns at his hips, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. A European exile in the backwaters of Ottoman Palestine, The foreigner is a bounty hunter in pursuit of a thief.
1948, Haifa
Burton. A man with one name, a detective inspector in the crumpled khaki uniform of the Palestine Police Force's CID. With just seven days before the British Mandate ends, he must find a murderer and a missing aristocrat, as order collapses around him.
Both men are outsiders in a land that is a palimpsest of ruins and loyalties, legacy of a history written in blood on a landscape that remembers everything. Both men will treat with bandits and mystics, dreamers and killers as they pursue their quarry; both will be ensnared in a lethal search for the fabled treasures of the Second Temple, long-lost amid the rise and fall of peoples, nations and empires. And both will be haunted by their dreams: burning red skies, a mountain of skulls, echoes of a vision from the dawn of humanity.
Before Jerusalem, before Jericho, there has always been Golgotha.
Golgotha features in the following genres: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction
Golgotha is available in Paperback, Hardback
Golgotha was written by Lavie Tidhar and published by Apollo an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
Golgotha has 352 pages
£18.00
