Zone

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 & 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 & amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone & 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, & written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard's Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary & panoramic view of violent conflict & its consequences in the twentieth century & beyond.

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Mathias Énard studied Persian & Arabic & has spent long periods in the Middle East. He has won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter & the Prix Décembre, & won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l’Orient, the Prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, & the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Compass.