The prophecy in Macbeth is fulfilled when, after so much murderous blood has been spilt, he sees no sense in stopping, which according to Martin Amis is the precise nature of the Holocaust. Opening with a witch’s cauldron and climaxing on Walpurgis Night, 1943, The Zone of Interest is an ambitious project that takes us back to the concentration camps of Auschwitz.

Angelus Thomsen is an officer at Buna-Werke and the nephew of Martin Bormann – Hitler’s private secretary. This connection affords him some safety from other top-ranking Nazis suspicious of his seductive and philandering ways. Hannah Doll is married to the kommandant, Paul Doll, an egotistical Nazi overseeing the selection of prisoners arriving on the trains, and Thomsen is quickly infatuated, embarking on a dangerous pursuit for her affections. Increasingly critical of the war and Nazi ideals, Hannah does everything in her power to hasten the psychological collapse of her husband, while skirting around Thomsen’s advances. Meanwhile, the horror and despair of the camps rages on around them, leaving the crux of the book to rest with Szmul, a Jewish prisoner enslaved to carry the dead.

One great line in Peter Matthiessen’s In Paradise, published earlier this year, asks whether another book on the Holocaust can reveal something that thousands of others haven’t, and Amis is well aware of this. The words ‘Hitler’ or ‘Auschwitz’ don’t appear once, and the text is rife with German phrases, leaving the casual reader occasionally bereft of context. But this is a novel and you can feel your way through, guided by the narrative tug of love in a hellish place. A culmination of a life’s reading, The Zone of Interest is an impressive display of research, if somewhat light on emotional punch.

Luke May is a freelance reviewer.