Synopses & Reviews
Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul — it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.
The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are?
Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, Martin Amis’s unforgettable new novel excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.
Review
“Simply put, a masterpiece....Profound, powerful and morally urgent...a benchmark for what serious literature can achieve.” Anthony Marra, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“Elegant and subtle...an intriguing, sophisticated effort to understand the daily culture of genocide.” Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times
Review
“It felt as though I had touched a third rail, so powerful and electric is the experience of reading [a] book that may stand for years as the triumph of his career.” Alan Cheuse, NPR
Review
“How to write fiction about the Holocaust that reveals in new and significant ways its systematic horror and impossible legacy? Amis accomplished this feat in Time’s Arrow, and now this brainy, intrepid, worldly, and virtuosic writer does it again in his fourteenth novel by ushering us into the poisoned minds of characters trapped in the death-spiral of the Final Solution....An audaciously satiric and brilliantly realized tale about personal angst and mass psychosis, and the immolation of self and soul.” Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
Review
“Essential reading....A haunting indictment of the people who willingly bought the party line of racial purity and ethnic cleansing, this novel is as audacious as it is chilling.” Barbara Love, Library Journal (starred review)
Review
“Brawny and urgent, it’s unmistakably Amis...an indelible and unsentimental exploration of the depths of the human soul.” Kirkus (starred review)
About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of thirteen previous novels, most recently Lionel Asbo; the memoir Experience; two collections of stories and six works of nonfiction. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.