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 startling & surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 & the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community & its children.

At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower & a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges & disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground
- & on the everyday realities he faces
- Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, & the pain.

Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark & Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos
- whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants'
- Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster & no less exact about the condition of childhood.

Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, & now, Nemesis: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?









...

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 startling & surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 & the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community & its children.

At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower & a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges & disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground
- & on the everyday realities he faces
- Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, & the pain.

Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark & Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos
- whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants'
- Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster & no less exact about the condition of childhood.

Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, & now, Nemesis: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?









...

Tearing its way through space on a collision course for Earth is Nemesis, a fiery ball of destruction, a dwarf star as red as the colour of blood.

Circling Nemesis is Rotor, an Earth colony whose occupants have cut themselves off from the anarchy & degeneration of an old & wasted world.

For them Rotor is a kind of Ark.

And Nemesis is the Flood....





...

Zombies in North London, death cults in the West Country, the engineering deck of the Enterprise: Simon Pegg has been ploughing some bizarre furrows in recent times. Having blasted onto the small screens with his now legendary sitcom Spaced, his rise to nation ...

Zombies in North London, death cults in the West Country, the engineering deck of the Enterprise: Simon Pegg has been ploughing some bizarre furrows in recent times. Having blasted onto the small screens with his now legendary sitcom Spaced, his rise to nation ...