Nemesis

In ´the stifling heat of equatorial Newark´, a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth´s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
Through this tory runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth´s late short novels: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?