The Ghost Writer

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'Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction' Washington Post

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this is the dark, engrossing mystery that introduced the iconic character of Nathan Zuckerman.

Talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes a pilgrimage to the home of his reclusive literary hero E. I. Lonoff, and soon finds himself enmeshed in the complexity and artifice of the great Jewish writer's domestic life.

As Nathan sits in awkward conversation with his idol, he catches a glimpse of a beautiful dark-haired woman through a closing doorway. Though he soon learns her name - Amy Bellette - her identity remains tantalisingly unclear. Throughout a disturbed and confusing dinner with Lonoff, Zuckerman discovers fragments of Amy's haunting past, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions.

'Roth's best novel yet'
London Review of Books

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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