The Human Stain

By: Philip Roth

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Brought to you by Penguin.

The American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best.

It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.

'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' Sunday Telegraph

©2000 Philip Roth (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand

A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race (Arifa Akbar)

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read