Mathias Enard

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German...

"A tremendous accomplishment... Zone is, in short, one of the best books of the year" - Daily Beast Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona, hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts. This is the same group...

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around restlessly on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions,...

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians,...

Recipient of three French literary awards, Mathias Enard's follow-up to the critically acclaimed Zone is a timely novel about a young Moroccan boy caught up in the turbulent events of the Middle East, and a possible murder. Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona hiding...

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...