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.

Seymour Levov, a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory, comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.

'Deception', Philip Roth's most poignant and provocative work since 'Portnoy's Complaint', explores adultery and the unmasking of illicit lovers in a novel that exposes the tenderness and uncertainty underlying all affairs of the heart.

A novel narrated by octogenarian ex-sportswriter Word Smith, who plans to write the 'Great American Novel' and also to tell the tragic and hilarious story of the Ruppert Mundys - the only homeless baseball team ever to play in the big league, who have disappeared from all official histories.