#1 New York Times bestselling author Johanna Lindsay presents
a powerfully romantic Regency-era tale that is breathtaking in scope
and wondrously passionate.
When Sebastian Townshend, son of the eighth Earl of Edgewood, was banished from his family due to the tragic results of a duel, he vowed never to return to England. Now living on the continent, Sebastian has forged a new identity as a deadly mercenary, The Raven. But his former neighbor, Lady Margaret Landor, has different plans for him. Back in England, Sebastian's father has had several accidents and Margaret suspects foul play and deception that reach as far back as the infamous duel. Convinced that only Sebastian can set the situation to rights, Margaret arranges a scandalous bargain with him that includes Sebastian's returning home as her husband. As the newlyweds uncover a deadly scheme, a fierce passion blossoms between them, which neither anticipated -- and neither can resist.
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Exit Ghost
List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $10.40
Your Save: $ 15.60 ( 60% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Book written by: Philip Roth
Average Customer Rating:  
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Exit Ghost - book description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780618915477
ISBN: 0618915478
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2007-10-01
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Editorial Reviews:
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Character driven novel w/focus on internal monologue
Comment: Exit Ghost focuses on 71 year old Nathan Zuckerman, writer, thinker, hermit. He comes back to NYC after a 10yr retreat in his rural cabin.
Reading this novel, you become intimate with Zuckerman, his every thought and the rational behind every decision. There are long dialogues with other characters. If you're looking for action, this isn't it. Not much drama happening here, except that created by the characters in their own minds.
Roth writes superb sentences. He summarizes situations profoundly in a few words. The structure and story hold together, and i like the devices Roth uses in writing the novel. It's a solid piece of work.
Personally, it's my opinion that Roth portrays Zuckerman as Joyce portrays S. Daedalus. But Roth would hate that i'm expressing my opinion on his work, and that you're wasting your time reading my opinion. In a perfect literary world, critics wouldn't comment, and readers would consume only the author's work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lifeless, Often Dull, Coda to Nathan Zuckerman's Life and Career
Comment: Having come across both Nathan Zuckerman - Philip Roth's fictional alter ego - and Roth's other work for years, I was eagerly awaiting "Exit Ghost" as the final chapter in Zuckerman's "life". What a final chapter it is, since it is more like a leisurely descent into a tedious half-hearted love affair between Zuckerman and a young Harvard-educated writer who is married to yet another young writer. While Roth still excells in writing fascinating dialogue and crisp prose, there's not much of a story to hang onto here, except for Zuckerman's precarious health, romantic fling, and an unexpected odyssey to look anew at the career of one of his mentors.
Roth incorporates in passing, much of the current cultural and political landscape, making obligatory nods to 9/11, the War on Terror and the 2004 presidential election. But, these are mere "obligatory nods", not thoughtful commentary on the state of our society as I have seen, for example, from acclaimed science fiction writer William Gibson in his recent novels "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" (Indeed who would have thought that Roth's importance as a fictional commentator of our time would be overtaken by the very man who coined the term "cyberspace"?). Forget Zuckerman and Roth, unless you wish to read Roth's compelling alternate history novel, "The Plot Against America".
Customer Rating:
Summary: poignant, as always.
Comment: I LOVE Philip Roth for his brutal and often embarrassing honesty, his incredibly sharp insight into cultural phenomena and their absurdity about which most of people are oblivious. In Exit Ghost, the protagonist is alot more subdued than in previous Zuckerman books, however, his forced withdrawal makes his observations far more introspective, and his imaginations more personal. I also enjoyed cultural commentaries through his characters about the dangers of tainting literature by cultural journalism.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The past is prologue
Comment: This is Nathan Zuckerman's latest novel. For those who may not know, Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth's alter ego and is the protagonist in many of Mr. Roth's books. For a decade, Nathan has relocated from the fast paced, daily craziness that is Manhattan to the quietness and solitude of the Berkshires to enable him to better concentrate on his writing. Nathan sees an advertisement of a young, newly married couple who desire to swap their apartment in Manhattan with someone living in a more bucholic environment, far away from the city. Jamie, the young wife in this couple, lives in constant fear of a terrorist attack in post-9/11 New York.
Nathan, now 71, had come to New York for prostate surgery and, then, for post-surgical treatment for incontinence. A secondary effect from the surgery is impotence. Nathan, while in New York, spots from the distance an old friend, Amy Bellette, the lover of the late I.E. Lonoff, a distinguished writer and early hero to Nathan. Amy, once youthful and quite attractive, is old and sick now. Nathan wishes to have lunch with Amy to speak over old times. Nathan who would like to write Lonoff's biography, is in competition with Richard Kleiman for the job. Kleiman allegedly knows a scandalous secret of Lonoff's and is threatening to expose it in his intended biography.
Having answered the young couple's ad and meeting with them, Nathan falls in love with Jamie and finds himself pining for her. Nathan is desparately smitten with her, but is extremely frustrated because of his chronic physical condition. Nathan is no longer the ladies's man he once was. Nathan tries to work out his dilemma by writing a story, which Nathan names, "He and She" which consists of a dialogue between the young woman with the much older man. It touches upon Nathan's current dilemma. Nathan also wishes to protect the infirm Amy from the annoyingly insistent Kleiman.
It is interesting that when Nathan meets Lonoff, his wife, and Lonoff's sweetheart, Amy, Nathan is working on a novel, _Ghost Writer_ about a young woman visiting the Lonoffs who bears a strong resemblance to a famous and beloved Holocaust martyr. Nathan becomes obsessed with her both as a male and a Jew.
What makes _Exit Ghost_ resonate so strongly with me is its keen sensitivity to the plight of the protagonist in his attempts to exorcise, or at least to reconcile, the ghosts of his past with the agonizing realities of the present. _Exit Ghost_ is palpably real and must be a particularly personal and heart felt work to Philip Roth. Therein lies the book's excellence.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Self-endulgent and boring
Comment: Exit Ghost was my first "Zuckerman" story, and even without knowing the history it was immediately obvious that Roth was writing about himself. Also obvious was that this is the latest effort in an on-going, self-indulgent exercise. Certainly Roth writes well, but capturing attention requires more than that, and a few chapters were all I could manage. I suppose that readers who've read earlier "Zuckerman" stories might want to see how it all ended, but as a stand-alone story it was just boring.
By the way Mr. Roth, having voted about 75% Democrat and 25% Republican in my own lifetime, I find it difficult to understand how anyone could think it exemplary or intelligent to have voted 100% one way or the other over their lifetime. Why on earth would you brag about behaving like an automaton?
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