A 2010 national poll of literary critics, academics and writers held by the magazine De Groene Amsterdammer elected Tirza as the "most important novel of the 21st century," over Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones and Ian McEwan's Saturday.

The story is about a girl who is like a dead person among the living and a major who tries to overcome his shame by leading an insurgent army.

Le Monde called The Man without Illness 'a wonderful gateway to the work of Arnon Grunberg, [who is] one of the most fascinating writers of his generation'.

Through his essays, opinion articles and lectures, Arnon Grunberg has made a major contribution to the public debate in international media about issues such as migration policy, discrimination, racism and human trafficking.

He has spent time with and written about masseurs at a Romanian resort, patients in a Belgian psychiatric ward, dining-car waiters on a Swiss train, and an ordinary Dutch family on vacation.

Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant praised the book: “Grunberg can not only sketch an unknown world with a few sharp strokes of the pen, but also bring it to vivid life.

"[20] Grunberg states he writes because he wants to know ‘how people do something like living their life’: "Everything is field research: friendship, sex, love, and work.

[22] In an attempt to understand the creative process, Grunberg wrote his latest novel Het Bestand (which, in Dutch, can refer to both a computer file and a truce) while scientists were measuring his brain activity, emotions, and subjective feelings.

The second stage of the experiment took place in October and November 2015 in the GrunbergLab at the University of Amsterdam, where volunteers' brain activity was measured while they were reading the novel in a controlled environment.