The Zone of Interest (Folio Prize Nominee)

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

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'.