The Zone of Interest (Folio Prize Nominee)
by Martin Amis
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Aug 28 2014 | Archive Date Feb 15 2015
Random House UK, Vintage Publishing | Jonathan Cape
Description
The new novel from Martin Amis
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.
A Note From the Publisher
UK edition – available to read in UK and Commonwealth excluding Canada.
Advance Praise
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.
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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Scotsman
There
are never stereotypes, no identikits, no stasis… The past, it reminds
us, is never over. One-sided fights form part of today’s continuous
present. Look around you. The Zone of Interest exposes the soul of that operation. It is, by a distance, one of Amis’s finest books. - Scotland on Sunday
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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Guardian
Marketing Plan
Combination of author and subject matter will ensure blanket coverage
Besides
the horror, Martin allows sex and comedy to occur at his Auschwitz.
This will cause outcry - but he is performing the same trick as he did
in Time’s Arrow; he has the courage to play with history, giving us a new perspective on the 20th century’s darkest hour.
Amis's
stature, and his risk-taking, mean his work is never met with universal
acclaim. But it should be remembered that for every bad review, there
is a truly great one (see Reviews for Other Titles) - and that he remains the totemic living British novelist.
Amis
is the bravest, most engaged British novelist of his generation. He
shrinks from no subject, and this should be celebrated. To quote a Guardian leader from 2008, entitled 'In Praise of Martin Amis': 'We should prize him - for his engagement as well as his gifts'.
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9780224099745 |
PRICE | £18.99 (GBP) |