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The Counterlife
  • Published: 6 October 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099481355
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $30.00

The Counterlife

Formats & editions
EBook
8 June 2011
Paperback
6 Oct 2005
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Reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016, The Counterlife was lauded by the likes of John Updike, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Banville and James Wood, as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

The Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies. Wherever they find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence.

Illuminating these lives in free-fall and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey; a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire; a church in London's West End; or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank. Shot through with head-turning dualities, as daring as it is moving, The Counterlife reinvents the novel with style, wit and grace.
  • Published: 6 October 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099481355
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $30.00

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 The Counterlife

Magnificent...splendid... I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me

New York Times Book Review

Roth is a comic genius... In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier

Martin Amis

Unquestionably his masterpiece

John Banville

Boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious... The final thing that needs to be said about The Counterlife...is that it's fucking funny

Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation with such a dense load of mediating intelligence - Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly

John Updike, New Yorker