A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and "our most accomplished novelist" (The New Yorker) turns his attention to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and "our most accomplished novelist" (The New Yorker) turns his attention to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.