Where to start with Philip Roth

American novelist, 1933–2018. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960 and 1995.

Best Philip Roth book to start with: American Pastoral (1997), on 3 of the 18 lists it could have made.

American Pastoral is the Roth to begin with. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and it follows a successful New Jersey businessman whose family life comes apart in the 1960s. It is his most complete novel and the best one for judging whether Roth suits you.

Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960 and is his first book, short and quick. Portnoy’s Complaint is a comic confession from a man to his analyst, brisk and indecent. The Ghost Writer, shortlisted for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1980, is slim: a young writer visits an older one, and the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, appears in several of the later books.

The Plot Against America imagines a 1940s America in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president, and The Human Stain follows a classics professor in a New England college town. Both are good next books. Sabbath’s Theater won the National Book Award in 1995 and is the rudest and most extreme, so approach it with care.

My Life as a Man, The Anatomy Lesson, The Counterlife and Operation Shylock were all shortlisted for the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. They are best for readers who have already taken to him.