Book overview
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
"It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle." --The New Yorker
"Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . .Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive. . . book Roth has written." --The Washington Post Book World
"A terrific political novel. . . . sinister, vivid, dreamlike. . . creepily plausible." --The New York Times Book Review
"Ambitous and chilling . . . a breathtaking leap of imagination. . . . The writing is brilliant."
--USA Today
In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America--and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.