The Zone of Interest
Published on 28. May 2015
Book
Paperback/Softback
320 pages
978-0-09-959368-3 (ISBN)
Description
THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILM
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love.
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.
As Thomsen and Doll's wife pursue their passion - the gears of Nazi Germany's Final Solution grinding around them - Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him.
'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.' Sunday Times
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love.
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.
As Thomsen and Doll's wife pursue their passion - the gears of Nazi Germany's Final Solution grinding around them - Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him.
'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.' Sunday Times
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 35 mm
Weight
224 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-959368-3 (9780099593683)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Martin Amis
The Zone of Interest
A stark and unsettling portrait of complicity inside Auschwitz, now an Oscar-winning film
E-Book
08/2014
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€8.99
Available for download
Person
Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.