Deception [Paperback]

"With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents inDeceptionthe tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center ofDeceptionare 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 thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation—mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. 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 book, and all there needs to be."This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." —The New York Times Book Review

"Deceptionis itself deceptive, as elegant and ingenious as anything inThe Ghost WriterorThe Prague Orgy." —Hermione Lee,New Repubic

"A fiendishly clever piece of work...an amazing feat.... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist." —William Pritchard,Hudson Review

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts atthe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.He twice won the National Book Award and the NationalBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/FaulknerAward three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceivedthe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstalƒ]