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The Ghost Writer
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  • Published: 2 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529914917
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $35.00

The Ghost Writer

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Aug 2005
EBook
8 June 2011
Audiobook
2 Mar 2023
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Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Ghost Writer is the first in Philip Roth's famous series of Zuckerman Books

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth.

As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy’s haunting Jewish background, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions…
  • Published: 2 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529914917
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $35.00
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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
Nemesis
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
Letting Go
See all

Praise for The Ghost Writer

'Roth's best novel yet'

London Review of Books

‘I only had to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller’

New York Review of Books

‘Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to relight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb’

Washington Post

‘His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, as natural as breathing’

Al Alvarez

'Roth's greatest and darkest mystery'

Independent

I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller

New York Review of Books

Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power - the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale - is superb

Washington Post

Roth's best novel yet

London Review of Books

His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, as natural as brething

Al Alvarez