The Plot Against America

Description

WINNER OF THE WHSmiths LITERARY AWARD When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for 'the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004'. Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work ... of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of achievement over a sustained career ... places him or her in the highest rank of American literature'. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

It's one of the great political novels for its depiction of how alterations in power affect ordinary men and women, and how obedience brings disaster. -- Linda Grant * New Statesman * In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself... America has not read enough of Philip Roth -- Bernard-Henri Levy * New Statesman * A dark, humane masterpiece, Roth is at the peak of his powers * The Times * Another frighteningly intense performance * Sunday Telegraph * The word genius doesn't seem excessive... The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism * Guardian * Untouchable...he is bequeathing us a body of work that adds up to the most accomplished dissection of American political, social and personal mores * Observer * Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive * Guardian * Subtle, persuasive and unsettling. A brilliantly troubling and heartening novel * Sunday Times * Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans - immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump's election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh's * New Yorker * Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today * Independent on Sunday * The novel is full of his usual furious cackling; tragedy tipping into comedy and comedy into tragedy within the space of a few sentences. The prose is beautiful * Mail on Sunday * A sensation * Sunday Times * A polemical classic * Esquire * Brilliant * Metro * One of the best writers of dialogue in the history of inverted commas * The Times * A reverberating celebration of family, community and humanity * Sunday Times *