VINTAGE CLASSICS : I MARRIED A COMMUNIST (R/I) PB B – PHILIP ROTH

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth turns his gaze on 30s and 40s America in this magnificent successor to American Pastoral. Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star – and as a bullying supporter of progressive political causes – Ira marries Hollywood s leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve s scandalous bestselling expose that identifies Ira as an American taking his orders from Moscow . In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge friends become deadly enemies, parents and children estranged, lovers blacklisted and the great felled from vertiginous heights. ‘Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity’ Mail on Sunday ‘A passionate and coruscating American tragedy’ Financial Times