The Counterlife

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1986 novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, follows the brothers Nathan and Henry Zuckerman through a series of alternate versions of their lives. In one, Henry dies after heart surgery; in another he moves to a settlement in the West Bank; in another Nathan dies, and later he lives in England with his English wife, Maria.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”