Decompression

Underwater, things can go wrong in an instant

Zeh's award-winning thriller climaxes with a scene of splendid drama

Deftly translated by John Cullen... Zeh plays with our expectations throughout... Like The Method, this is a story about obsession – this time with status, looks, and celebrity culture

Erotic intrigue, deep-sea diving and clients from hell make for a lively mix...The gathering suspense is complemented by nuanced characterization in a pleasingly unpredictable work

Juli Zeh was born in 1974 and lives in Brandenburg. She studied International Law, has worked with the UN in New York, and completed her studies in Creative Writing. Juli has won numerous awards, including the German Book Prize, the international Per Olov Enquist Award and the French Prix Cévennes for Best European Novel. One of Europe's best young writers, her work has been translated into thirty languages.

Jola is a beautiful and privileged soap star who wants very much to be taken seriously; her partner Theo is a middle-aged author with writers’ block. In an attempt to further her career, Jola is determined to land the lead role in a new film about underwater photographer and model Lotte Hass. 
 
To improve her chances, the couple travel to Lanzarote and hire diving instructor Sven, paying him a large sum for exclusive tuition. Sven is meticulously planning his most ambitious expedition yet – to an untouched wreck 100 metres down on the ocean floor. Diving calls for a cool head and, as a sinister love triangle develops, events rapidly get out of hand. But whose story do we trust - Sven's or Jola's? 
 
Deliciously claustrophobic, smart, and unrelentingly intense, this psychological thriller with shades of Patricia Highsmith will leave readers gasping for air.

Dark Matter

A startling philosophical thriller from an immensely gifted young star of European fiction.

A compelling novel, thrilling yet profound...This book makes for a wonderful read, gripping until the last page. A masterpiece!

A thrilling read as well as a terrific mental workout

An intelligent an beautifully crafted existential thriller ... Zeh's lyricism and intellect lend the book a depth often lacking in mainstream thrillers

Zeh constructs an impressive matrix of information for each of her key players and provides descriptions that are vivid and original ... Her often unexpected imagery is precise and pithy ... this philosophical thriller is well paced; one turns the pages impatient for the denouement

Dark Matter by Juli Zeh - a much-acclaimed German writer - is the kind of crime novel often described as philosophical, literary, psychological or even intellectual...That is no bad thing, but only if well executed, as Dark Matter undoubtedly is...Unusual and intriguing

One might think that such perfection, such erudition must leave the reader untouched...but it does not. For that, Zeh's labyrinth is built too cleverly, its corridors are adorned with witty elements, her sentences are of extraordinary brilliance

A compulsive read ... ingenious and deftly-handled

It is certainly the best novel I've read so far this year, and should mark Zeh as one of Europe's brightest younger novelists

Every chapter is taut, suspenseful, almost Hitchcock-esque. Zeh's style is fluent but also elegantly sparse... An absolute gem of a book.

From every angle - character study, philosophical discussion or straightforward plot - it shines with crystalline intensity, and so far as one can tell, nothing is lost in the translation. Complex and supremely elegant, this is a book to relish

Juli Zeh was born in 1974 and lives in Brandenburg. She studied International Law, worked with the UN in New York, and completed her studies in Creative Writing. Juli Zeh has won numerous awards, including the international Per Olov Enquist Award and the French Prix Cévennes for Best European Novel. Her work has been translated into thirty languages.

Sebastian and Oskar have been friends since their days studying physics at university, when both were considered future Nobel Prize candidates. But after their graduation, their lives took very different paths; while Oskar holds a prestigious research post in Geneva, Sebastian worries that he hasn't lived up to his intellectual promise, having chosen marriage and fatherhood as an exit strategy. 
 
A few days after a particularly heated argument between the two men, Sebastian leaves his son sleeping in the back seat while he goes into a service station. When he returns, the car has disappeared without trace. His phone rings and a voice informs him that in order to get his son back he must kill a man. As Sebastian's life unravels, the only person he can safely reach out to is Oskar...

Juli Zeh

Sally-Ann Spencer

This is a brilliant, disturbing and wildly imaginative picture of the nanny state run mad; how far should the State be allowed to poke its nose into a citizen's business?

Zeh seems to have won every European literary prize going...Three years since its first publication in German (it is translated here with tremendous gusto by Sally-Ann Spencer), Zeh’s novel is even more relevant to our over-structure, over-quantified times.

An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia

In Sally-Ann Spencer's superb translation from German, Juli Zeh's novel gives form to a dystopia that remains hauntingly recognizable

Thoughtful and intelligent...her main character Mia is an intellectual heroine as much as a physical rebel.

Tightly plotted, philosophically enquiring and disturbingly plausible

A work of prophetic historic pessimism, The Method is closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Juli Zeh pictures the lapse into brutality with a strange coldness. She is an analytic, apocalyptical writer in the tradition of Yevgeny Zamyatin, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick.

Juli Zeh is an Olympian narrator who regards her characters from an extremely wide angle... This author excels in creating experimental set-ups, sharp-witted intellectual ping-pong games, told with narrative verve and sanguinity.

Mia Holl lives in a state governed by The Method, where good health is the highest duty of the citizen. Everyone must submit medical data and sleep records to the authorities on a monthly basis, and regular exercise is mandatory. 
 
 
Mia is young and beautiful, a successful scientist who is outwardly obedient but with an intellect that marks her as subversive. Convinced that her brother has been wrongfully convicted of a terrible crime, Mia comes up against the full force of a regime determined to control every aspect of its citizens' lives.

The Method

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Praise for The Method

This is a brilliant, disturbing and wildly imaginative picture of the nanny state run mad; how far should the State be allowed to poke its nose into a citizen's business?

Zeh seems to have won every European literary prize going...Three years since its first publication in German (it is translated here with tremendous gusto by Sally-Ann Spencer), Zeh’s novel is even more relevant to ...

An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia

This is a brilliant, disturbing and wildly imaginative picture of the nanny state run mad; how far should the State be allowed to poke its nose into a citizen's business?

Zeh seems to have won every European literary prize going...Three years since its first publication in German (it is translated here with tremendous gusto by Sally-Ann Spencer), Zeh’s novel is even more relevant to ...

An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia

This is a brilliant, disturbing and wildly imaginative picture of the nanny state run mad; how far should the State be allowed to poke its nose into a citizen's business?

Zeh seems to have won every European literary prize going...Three years since its first publication in German (it is translated here with tremendous gusto by Sally-Ann Spencer), Zeh’s novel is even more relevant to ...

An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia

Books by Juli Zeh

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