Description

Francis Mirkovic, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone – the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality – to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard’s Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond

Publisher Review

‘[Zone is] an ambitious study of twentieth century conflict and disaster … Enard does for the comma in Zone what Eimear McBride did for the full stop in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and just as McBride brought her writing a raw intensity and immediacy, Enard brings to his a similarly fierce political engagements and moral authority … Enard’s novel is to be seen within a tradition of French avant-garde writing … The result is a modern masterpiece…’

– David Collard, Times Literary Supplement ‘[T]he material of a conventional thriller has been sublimated into an atmosphere of violence, power and cruelty; humanity here is little more than a vector through which various kinds of insanity flow.’

– Nicholas Lezard, Guardian ‘[T]he brilliance of Zone lies in its brutal refusal to stop. Again and again, Mathias Enard’s white-knuckle narrative plunges us back into the battle-scarred past, forcing us to confront its horrors … a relentlessly inventive novel.’

– David Winters, Literary Review ‘Zone is a major and compelling work, a work that will keep you in its grip from its first utterance to its last.’

– Brian Evenson, author of Last Days ‘Like Flaubert and James Joyce, Enard seems to have found a model for his omnivorous novel in the Homeric epic, while Ezra Pound’s ghost also haunts Zone…. Enard’s erudite and ambitious novel is … a Flaubertian encyclopaedia of our times at the end of a violent century.’

– Stephen Burn, New York Times