Zone

‘[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