Indignation

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a “mesmerizing [novel that] demands to be read in one sitting. It’s that good” (The Seattle Times). A young man begins his sophomore year far from home on the conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College, where he must navigate the customs and constrictions of another America.

In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad—mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way in this other American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in Roth’s recent books and a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history.