The Ghost Writer

At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life...The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

"What a pleasure! Roth’s writing alone is so precise and so simple that experiencing just the diction, let alone the pain and wry humour, of one sentence after another left me giddy. This is a master prose writer... Each word does its job better than any other word in its place could."   -  The Mookse & The Gripes

"Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb."   —  The Washington Post

Philip Milton Roth gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman which began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include American Pastoral (1997) (winner of the Pulitzer Prize). In May 2011, he won the Man Booker International