When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process.

Tells the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. This novella is also accompanied by five short stories.

Intended to be the personification of mankind, this work traces from the author's first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers. It is a human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be.

Peter is a gifted young writer, and Maureen Tarnopol is the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying - and failing - to write his way free of it.

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left 11 years ago. Alone on his New England mountain, Nathan has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.

A work of candour and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. It concentrates on five episodes from Philip Roth's life.

America, 1951. Marcus Messner, from Newark, New Jersey, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. Far away from home, in the Midwestern college, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his 60s, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire.

In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death.

This is the story of Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced puppeteer who, after the death of his long-time mistress, embarks on a raging journey into dionysian extremism, madness and bitter understanding. Philip Roth won the 1995 National Book Award.