A dazzling novel about a man and woman married to other peopleโand the riveting conversations that take place before and after they make loveโfrom the acclaimed Pulitzer Prizeโwinning author of American Pastoral.
"This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." โThe New York Times Book Review
With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writesโand exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversationโmainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogueโsharp, rich, playful, inquiring, "moving," as Hermione Lee writes, "on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety"โis nearly all there is to this book, and all there needs to be.