Zuckerman Unbound

Format:

Pre-order:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive TGJones Waterstones

'Elegant and furious...Witty, tender and brutal' Melvyn Bragg

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this sharply funny sequel to The Ghost Writer follows Nathan Zuckerman through the pitfalls of fame.

Following the wild success of his novel, Carnovsky, Nathan Zuckerman has been catapulted into the literary limelight. As he ventures out onto the streets of Manhattan he finds himself accosted on all sides, the target of admonishers, advisers, would-be literary critics, and – worst of all – fans.

Zuckerman is an incompetent celebrity and unsure of how to live up to his fictional creation’s notoriety. While he flounders his way through a high-profile affair, the disintegration of his family life, and fends off the attentions of his most tenacious fan yet, the turbulent sixties are drawing to a close. Beneath the uneasy glamour of these years lurk the spectres of the recently murdered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an unsettled Zuckerman feels himself watched…

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.

Learn more

Details