The Zone of Interest

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

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

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

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

A grim and bold return to form.

Shortlist

A work of artistic courage, chilling comedy and incontestable moral seriousness.

Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times

Brave and ambitious.

Dan Brotzel, UK Press Syndication

Amis’s staggering linguistic gifts return in full force… The book takes up right up against the limits of language.

Kevin Power, Sunday Business Post

Martin Amis isn’t new to the business of turning the horrors of history into fiction, but he has never done so more thoughtfully than in this disquieting novel.

Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement

A difficult, troubling read, and easily Amis’ most successful new release for a decade.

Emma Hughes, Tablet

Strange and haunting.

Robert Collins, Prospect

Arguably his best…. A must-read

Victoria Moore, Daily Mail

Stunningly simple and profound.

Will Gore, Catholic Herald

The strength of this masterly novel is that it illuminates without pretending to explicate.

Ronan Farren, Belfast Telegraph Morning

It’s signature Amis at his most inventive, and it is through…inspired and irreverent fluency that his dead-serious purpose is realized.

Tova Reich, Washington Post

Most fiction would break under the weight of so much self-reflection, but The Zone of Interest does not even bend... Deft, ironic and horribly funny... A brilliantly believable account of an episode which is beyond belief.

Frances Wilson, Oldie

The Zone of Interest succeeds because in it Amis is seriously funny - that is to say, funny for serious purposes.

Ben Cooke, Cherwell Newspaper

Martin Amis’s best novel in years

Ian Rankin, Guardian

It’s a brilliant feat of imagination and chutzpah.

Viv Groskop, Observer

Is the Holocaust a fit subject for fiction? … The only proper response is to read this remarkable, deeply disturbing and quite original novel.

Alan Taylor, Herald

Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest achieved the near impossible, confounding his detractors with this horrifying glimpse into the heard of Nazi darkness.

Bert Wright, Irish Times

The Zone of Interest is Amis at his boldest and best.

Allan Massie, Scotsman

What would be otherwise be light entertainment…becomes sinister and strange, warped by the enormous atrocities happening just offstage.

Lev Grossman and Radhika Jones, Time Magazine

Martin Amis’s best novel in years.

Ian Rankin, Guardian Weekly

It is always hard to read factual material about the Holocaust but in fiction Amis has shined a light into this darkness which offers no answers but is still profoundly moving.

Richard Jaffa, Birmingham Jewish Recorder

It was very, very good.

Joseph Connolly, Lady

I think everyone should read it – it is so horrific.

Kirsty Wark, Lady

A well-received return to form

Charlotte Heathcote, Daily Express

Astonishingly bold novel… [It] is Amis’s best work in years

Mail on Sunday

Amis’s best work since Money

Richard Susskind, The Times