An absolutely brilliant new novel by one of the world's great writers
It's Summer, 1944. In the 'stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. Vigorous, decent, twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.
Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, "Everyman", "Indignation", "The Humbling", and now, "Nemesis": What choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?
About the Author
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for ‘the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004’.
Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award ‘for a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship’ and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose ‘scale of achievement over a sustained career… places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Book Prize.
In 2005 Philip Roth became the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
Industry Reviews
Heart-wrenchingly powerful * Sunday Times *
A mesmerically imagined work of realism... A shocking gem... A masterclass in literature and life, that reaches into the pits of the dead * Guardian *
What makes Roth such an important novelist is the effortless way he brings together the trivial and the profoundly serious * Independent *
A masterful performance * Spectator *
Nemesis is an artfully constructed suspenseful novel with a cunning twist -- J.M. Coetzee
