Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction The Counterlife is about people
living their dreams of renewal and escape some of them going so far as to risk their lives to
alter their destinies. Wherever they find themselves the characters of The Counterlife are
tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence. Illuminating these lives in free-fall
and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical
enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change
personal fortune and reshape history whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey a
tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire a church in London's West End or in a tiny
desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank. Shot through with head-turning dualities as
daring as it is moving The Counterlife reinvents the novel with style wit and grace.
