The Plot Against America: A Novel

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Winner of the Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction

"A terrific political novel . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president.

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America—and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

“A richly terrifying historical novel…. [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.”  - Esquire

“Never has [Roth’s voice] been more nuanced … beautifully particularized…. [A] novelist who for 45 years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in The Plot Against America.” - Boston Globe

“Ingenious … Roth’s gorgeous and forceful prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and lucid.”  - Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth)

“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them…. Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it…. A fabulous yarn.” - Los Angeles Book Review

“A remarkable act of historical imagination and one of [Roth’s] most moving novels.” - People

“Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his hometown…. [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” - Time

“The writing is extraordinary, complex but highly readable, evocative, and colored with a tenderness and affection…. This is one of Roth’s finest books.”  - O, the Oprah Magazine

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving…. Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive … book Roth has written." - Washington Post Book World

“A terrific political novel…. Sinister, vivid, dreamlike … creepily plausible…. You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.”  - New York Times Book Review

“Roth’s most powerful book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly–terrifyingly–believable." - San Francisco Chronicle

“Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–now…. A stunning work.” - Christian Science Monitor

“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish–and also funnier and more bizarre–as is goes along…. [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle." - New Yorker

“Ambitious and chilling … a breath-taking leap of imagination…. The writing is brilliant.”  - USA Today

“The most compelling of living writers…. [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” - New York magazine