“With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes – and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction.

At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her 30s, she is already nervously half-resigned.

That dialogue – sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, “moving”, as Hermione Lee writes, “on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety” – is nearly all there is to this audiobook, and all there needs to be.

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth’s fiction-often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey-is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its “sensual, ingenious style” and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. Continue reading →