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Nemesis
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  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099542261
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $24.99

Nemesis

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Oct 2010
Audiobook
14 Mar 2024
Paperback
1 Dec 2011
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The stunning final novel from the great Philip Roth, now reissued in electric new backlist style


It's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic.

Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.

'The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works' Daily Mail

'Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned' Sunday Telegraph

'Very fine, very unsettling' Douglas Kennedy, The Times
  • Published: 1 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099542261
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again. Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Humbling
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
Letting Go
Everyman
See all

Praise for Nemesis

Heart-wrenchingly powerful

Sunday Times

What makes Roth such an important novelist is the effortless way he brings together the trivial and the profoundly serious

Independent

Outstanding

Sunday Times

Very fine, very unsettling

Douglas Kennedy, The Times

A perfectly proportioned Greek tragedy played out against the background of the polio epidemic that swept Newark, New Jersey, during the summer of 1944

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned

Tibor Fischer, Sunday Telegraph

Nemesis is an artfully constructed suspenseful novel with a cunning twist

J.M. Coetzee

A mesmerically imagined work of realism... A shocking gem... A masterclass in literature and life, that reaches into the pits of the dead

Guardian

The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works

Daily Mail

A masterful performance

Spectator