The Method

Description

The government knows your medical data, your sleep patterns and exercise is mandatory. Good health is your highest civic duty. But what happens when you rebel against this controlling regime? 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.

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 Cevennes for Best European Novel. Her work has been translated into thirty languages.

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? -- Kate Saunders * Times * 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. -- Simon Ings * Guardian * An impressively plausible account of a conformist society disguised as a utopia -- Lucy Popescu * Independent * In Sally-Ann Spencer's superb translation from German, Juli Zeh's novel gives form to a dystopia that remains hauntingly recognizable -- Charlotte Ryland * Times Literary Supplement * Thoughtful and intelligent...her main character Mia is an intellectual heroine as much as a physical rebel. -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *