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
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About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of stories, and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth: Why Write? (LOA #300)
The Humbling
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
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
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