[]
Letting Go
  • Published: 3 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099485032
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $57.00

Letting Go

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Dec 2007
EBook
1 June 2011
Buy from…
Book Hero BookHub Fishpond Mighty Ape Paper Plus The Nile The Warehouse Whitcoulls Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

Letting Go was Philip Roth's first full-length novel, now reissued in electric new backlist style

Gabe Wallach, freshly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, and thus freed from old attachments, is hungrily seeking new ones. He's drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate in literature, and to Libby - Paul's moody, Catholic-turned-Jewish wife. Gabe wonders: how to reconcile the ordered 'world of feeling' found in books with the anarchy of life, responsible adulthood, and his own love affairs? When Gabe meets Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, she poses the greatest challenge that he, and his moral enthusiasm, will face.

Letting Go is Philip Roth's blistering first full-length novel.
  • Published: 3 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099485032
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $57.00

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 Plot Against America
Nemesis
Exit Ghost
I Married a Communist
The Dying Animal
The Humbling
Indignation
See all

Praise for Letting Go

One of the country's finest, most forcefully intelligent and serious contemporary writers

New York Times

There's no doubting how good a writer Roth is

Guardian

A rare pleasure to read

Time

A first novel of awesome maturity

James Atlas

A rich book, full of incident, wry and sad and even in its most desolating scenes somehow amusing

Harper's

[Roth] has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis

Stanley Edgar Hyman

Letting Go seethes with life

New York Times

Letting Go is further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent...amusing and touching and shocking by turns

New York Times