Everyman - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224078690 ISBN 13: 9780224078696

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, Everyman, is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

About this title

Product Description:

Roth novel on aging and spectre of death. Some light shelfwear to jacket. Otherwise crisp and clean. Very good condition.

Review:

"A brilliantly compressed account of a life." -- Christopher Tayler, The Sunday Telegraph, Seven

"Anything new by Roth is a welcome treat...the book is full of wit and insight" -- Tatler, Sebastian Shakespeare

"Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs" -- Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

"Unexpectedly moving and written in an inviting easy story-telling style..." -- The Economist

"it is worth mentioning what a readable writer Roth is...has always had the knack of drawing his reader along" -- TLS, Benjamin Markovits

"paints a rich portrait" -- Daily Mail, Michael Arditti

"sombre but always lively novella" -- Monday Independent rvd by Paul bailey

"this is as dark a novel as Roth has written yet it reads like a dream" -- Sunday Herald, Alan Taylor

A very distinguished novel...presents the reader with life’s one certainty and does so with great power." -- Leo Robson, Express

fascinating family saga which reveals a corner of American
Culture
-- Sunday Express

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0224078690
• ISBN 13: 9780224078696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192