NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A “magnificent…splendid” novel (The New York Times Book Review) from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral about people living out their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them even risking their lives to change their seemingly irreversible fates.
Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, 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, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.
WINNER
| 2011 Man Booker International Prize
WINNER
| 1987 National Book Critics Circle Awards
"Magnificent ... splendid.... I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me." —William Gass, The New York Times Book Review
"Roth is a comic genius.... In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier." —Martin Amis, The Atlantic
"No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such a dense load of mediating intelligence.... Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly." —John Updike, The New Yorker
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A “magnificent…splendid” novel (The New York Times Book Review) from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral about people living out their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them even risking their lives to change their seemingly irreversible fates.
Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, 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, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.
Awards
WINNER
| 2011 Man Booker International Prize
WINNER
| 1987 National Book Critics Circle Awards
Praise
"Magnificent ... splendid.... I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me." —William Gass, The New York Times Book Review
"Roth is a comic genius.... In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier." —Martin Amis, The Atlantic
"No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such a dense load of mediating intelligence.... Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly." —John Updike, The New Yorker
