Indignation
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Indignation is Philip Roth’s best novel since The Counterlife (1986). In that long meantime the author has published many fine works – perhaps too many; he is almost as prolific as Updike – but none as intricately wrought, passionate and fascinating as this one. Roth has been much praised for the Lear-like bellowings of such works as Sabbath’s Theater and The Dying Animal and, more recently, the death-haunted Everyman and Exit Ghost. But in this new novel he has regained the poise and subtlety of his earliest work and produced a late masterpiece.