Description
Book SynopsisWinner 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.
Trade ReviewRoth 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 *
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 *
