Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2011.
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?
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2011.
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.
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
Author
About Philip Roth
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years 'for the entire work of the recipient'. In 2011 Philip Roth was awarded the International Man Booker Prize.
