Waterstones Kensington Book Club - August

Join us at Waterstones Kensington for our monthly book club. In August, we will be discussing the 1998 Pulitzer Prize Winner, American Pastoral by Philip Roth.

Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral focuses on Seymour "Swede" Levov, the son of a successful glove manufacturer whose business he eventually inherits. Handsome, wealthy, his story is the American Dream made real.However, all that is shattered by the political radicalisation of his daughter, a girl outraged by the horrors of the Vietnam war. To his abject horror, her role in an act of extreme, home-turf terrorism rips his life apart: American Pastoral unpicks that downfall, the Swede’s story partly seen through the prism of his younger brother Jerry and Zuckerman’s own encounters with this most tragic of figures.

American Pastoral is perhaps Philip Roth’s masterpiece. Slipping into his Zuckerman sequence (briskly followed by I Married a Communist in the following year), the novel charts the slow-motion destruction of a once-ideal life.