The Zone of Interest - Hardcover

Amis, Martin

3.71

6,623 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224099744 ISBN 13: 9780224099745

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2014

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Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize

'Surely his masterpiece... Intelligent, terrifying and comic... Amis has tackled the biggest questions with imagination and intelligence, and the ultimate strength of this masterly novel is that he knows, and shows, that although there is no answer to the questions Auschwitz poses, we must never stop asking them. Read it, ponder it – revel in it indeed – then read it again.'
Allan Massie, Scotsman

There was an old story about a king who asked his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. Instead, it showed you your soul – it showed you who you really were. But the king couldn’t look into the mirror without turning away, and nor could his courtiers. No one could.

What happens when we discover who we really are? And how do we come to terms with it? Fearless and original, The Zone of Interest is a violently dark love story set against a backdrop of unadulterated evil, and a vivid journey into the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

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Review:

"Auschwitz was, in the most essential sense, “unspeakable”. It’s thus something only creative writing can speak about. If you’re Amis, that is.... The most daring novelist of our time." (John Sutherland The Times)

"The Zone of Interest is a tour de force of sheer verbal virtuosity, and a brilliant, celestially upsetting novel inspired by no less than a profound moral curiosity about human beings. It's stunning." (Richard Ford)

"Nasty, timely, as good as anything Amis has written since London Fields... He has done his subject justice." (Spectator)

"It is energetic, deeply researched, it is bracingly cruel... It makes the reader squirm and resist and finally laugh... A superb novel, an important one... Where was the career-crowning work that might finally win this author his Booker? Seriously, look no further." (Tom Lamont GQ)

"He likes to stamp every sentence with his authority, like the name through a stick of rock, and here he reinvents hell on earth in his distinctively gaudy, insistent, elaborate prose. It is exceptionally brave.... Shakespearean.... It’s exciting; it’s alive; it’s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting." (Theo Tait Sunday Times)

"Surely his masterpiece... Intelligent, terrifying and comic... Amis has tackled the biggest questions with imagination and intelligence, and the ultimate strength of this masterly novel is that he knows, and shows, that although there is no answer to the questions Auschwitz poses, we must never stop asking them. Read it, ponder it – revel in it indeed – then read it again." (Allan Massie Scotsman)

"The novel poses the question that will forever haunt the 20th century: how did the most cultivated nation the Earth had ever seen give way to such infamy, ‘such wild disgrace’?... Amid the horror of the so-called ‘selections’ and ‘aktions’, amid the relentless grind of the Nazi killing machines, humanity somehow survives, and so does comedy." (Anthony Quinn Mail on Sunday)

"The Zone of Interest may be his greatest book; it is that good.... It is inventive, awful, testing and, like Picasso’s Guernica, incongruously beautiful. Would that Primo Levi were around to read it." (Alan Taylor Herald)

"He writes superbly but with an unusual modesty... He lets his story speak for itself and the result is the best Amis novel in two decades." (Jake Kerridge Sunday Express)

"A brutish comedy, an occult tale of jealousy and revenge, a farce of thwarted will and missed cues.... He has created a fictional artifice that allows us to see the outline of that which is beyond words." (Alex Clark Guardian)

Book Description:

The new novel from Martin Amis

Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize

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