Operation Shylock

A Confession

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'Subtle, funny and furious' Observer

What if a lookalike stranger stole your name, hijacked your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you?

Startlingly, Philip Roth meets a man in Jerusalem called Philip Roth who has been touring Israel - riding high on the author's reputation - preaching a bizarre reverse-exodus of the Jews, encouraging them to return to their ancestral homes in Europe. Roth decides to stop him, even if that means impersonating the impersonator.

Operation Shylock is at once spy story, political thriller, meditation on identity and unfathomable journey through a volatile, frightening middle-east.

Subtle, funny and furious
Observer

About 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.

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