InThe Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself America has not read enough of Philip Roth Bernard-Henri Lévy When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invades every Jewish household in America. Not only has Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiates a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, guaranteeing peaceful relations between the two nations.

What then follows is the alternative America of this startling counterfactual novel by Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacingly anti-Semitic years of the Lindbergh presidency. Jewish families are shaken violently apart, whilst America is oblivious to its own dark metamorphosis.

Many passages inThe Plot Against Americaecho feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trumps election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by LindberghsNew Yorker

Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoralin 1997.In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceived the Society of American Historians Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.

Roth received PENs two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for a body of work . . . of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose scale of achievement over a sustained career . . . places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.

'The Plot Against America is an epic built - painstakingly, passionately, near perfectly - of the small structures of the particular. A dark, human masterpiece. Roth is at the peak of his powers' The Times