The Plot Against America

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‘One of the great political novels for its depiction of how...obedience brings disaster’ New Statesman

Discover the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's remarkably imaginative counterfactual American history, with frighteningly real insights into the way we live now.

In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the presidential election. Jewish households across America are gripped by uncertainty and fear when the landslide winner takes office. Charles A. Lindbergh is a celebrated aviator and rabid isolationist, who has publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a 'pointless' war with Nazi Germany.

Under Lindbergh, the United States signs a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler and becomes menacingly anti-Semitic. In this startling counterfactual nightmare, Philip Roth recounts a ghettoised childhood and the fate of his Newark family in an alternative America oblivious to its own dark metamorphosis.

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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