Dan Hartland gently dissents from the praise of Lavie Tidhar's Osama:

This, however, is where the occasional clumsiness of its prose can come also to characterise its wider project. In the novel’s final denouement, which takes place in a blissfully unbombed (and apparently unTalibaned) Afghanistan, I’m not sure what Joe’s liminal position on the border of two worlds really tells us about either. Over at SF Signal, John Stevens argues that “this is not a novel that is about satisfactory endings, since it is not about satisfactory beginnings or middles either”, but the circularity of Stevens’s nevertheless very interesting piece suggests to me that nor is Osama a novel with a clear thesis about the absence of clarity. Simply, it is just a tad uneven. Sometimes it gets lost – Tidhar has a weird fetish for describing the movement of people around London as if staring at an A-Z – and sometimes it’s too bald – “was mass murder a crime, or was it a political act? And who decided?” Osama deserves to be read for the imaginative way in which it uses genre to challenge the semiotics of the war on terror, but it doesn’t seem to know what to do with the discourse once it has been deconstructed. It may well be a feature rather than a bug, then, but Osama is in one sense a fuzzy-wuzzy sort of book.