Nemesis is a novel by Philip Roth published on October 5, 2010, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is Roth's 31st book, "a work of fiction set in the summer of 1944 that tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children."[1][2]
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Nemesis explores the effect of a 1944 polio epidemic on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community. The children are threatened with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and death.
At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, 23-year-old playground director Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground—and on the everyday realities he faces—Roth examines some of the central themes of pestilence: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
Moving between the streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos, Roth depicts a decent, energetic man struggling in his own private war against the epidemic.
Nemesis was shortlisted for the 2011 Wellcome Trust Book Prize, which honors "the best of medicine in literature".
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