Dear Wags,

Ten years ago, Martin Amis published the Zone of Interest. The novel elicited passionate reviews, positive and negative. In the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates grappled with the book’s strangeness: “a grim satire, part office comedy, part romance, part lyrical dissection of a civilization gone very, very wrong.”

The structure is knotty, but the plot is simple: The Doll family live in a beautiful house surrounded by a lush garden. The back wall of this idyllic real estate abuts the Oswiecim camp, better known as Auschwitz. Paterfamilias Paul Doll is a mediocre bureaucrat and the camp commandant. His wife Hannah and their children enjoy a serene life adjacent to a death camp. When Doll is reassigned to Germany, Hannah begs to remain in her Polish paradise with the children.