The Method

Reviews / Votes

This is a brilliant, disturbing and wildly imaginative picture of the nanny state run mad; how far should the State be allowed to poke its nose into a citizen's business? -- Kate Saunders * Times * Zeh seems to have won every European literary prize going...Three years since its first publication in German (it is translated here with tremendous gusto by Sally-Ann Spencer), Zeh's novel is even more relevant to our over-structure, over-quantified times. -- Simon Ings * Guardian * An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia -- Lucy Popescu * Independent * In Sally-Ann Spencer's superb translation from German, Juli Zeh's novel gives form to a dystopia that remains hauntingly recognizable -- Charlotte Ryland * Times Literary Supplement * Thoughtful and intelligent...her main character Mia is an intellectual heroine as much as a physical rebel. -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald * Tightly plotted, philosophically enquiring and disturbingly plausible * List * A work of prophetic historic pessimism, The Method is closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Juli Zeh pictures the lapse into brutality with a strange coldness. She is an analytic, apocalyptical writer in the tradition of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. * Die Zeit * Juli Zeh is an Olympian narrator who regards her characters from an extremely wide angle... This author excels in creating experimental set-ups, sharp-witted intellectual ping-pong games, told with narrative verve and sanguinity. * Der Spiegel *