Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body. The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff ’s would be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff ’s "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Haunted by Roth’s earlier work, The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.

Penguin Group (Canada) to Publish Philip Roth's Exit Ghost

Toronto, January 16, 2007—Penguin Group (Canada) has signed Exit Ghost, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth. The widely anticipated novel will be published on October 3, 2007. Penguin Group (Canada)'s Nicole Winstanley acquired the novel from Katherine Marino of London's Wylie Agency. “Philip Roth is widely acknowledged as one of the world's best writers of ours, or any time. We're privileged to be publishing him for the first time in Canada,” said Penguin Group (Canada) Publisher David Davidar.

If Philip Roth's first Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer (published in 1979) was a portrait of the artist as a young man then Exit Ghost is a portrait of the artist as an old man. Bedeviled by the powers he's lost, fearful of losing the powers that remain — and that are vital to his vocation — Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after eleven years of living as a solitary, reclusive writer in the rural hills of western Massachusetts. His encounters in New York with a new generation of writers and with an old, dying friend produce revelations that gravely unsettle him and make of the final Zuckerman book a moving study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation, and ungratifiable desire.

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He was educated in the Newark public schools, going on to receive his B.A. from Bucknell University and his M.A. from the University of Chicago.

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice received the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2006 Roth received the PEN/Nabokov Award for his body of work. Houghton, publisher of Goodbye, Columbus which won the National Book Award in 1960, has also published Roth's Sabbath's Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998),  The Human Stain (2000), Shop Talk (2001) The Dying Animal (2001) The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006).

In 2005 Philip Roth became the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Founded in 1974 as a distribution company for Penguin books from all over the world, Penguin Group (Canada) began publishing Canadian and international titles in 1977, and quickly became known as one of Canada's pre-eminent publishers of literary fiction and non-fiction. Penguin Group (Canada) is the proud publisher of Joseph Boyden, Zadie Smith, Khaled Hosseini, Margaret MacMillan, John Ralston Saul, Adrienne Clarkson and Michael Ignatieff.

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For further information: Yvonne Hunter, Director, Publicity and Marketing, (416) 928-2409, yvonne.hunter@ca.penguingroup.com.