The Plot Against America

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. The chilling storey of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president is soon to be an HBO limited series. Shortly after, Lindbergh strikes a friendly agreement with Adolf Hitler, while the new administration begins on a widespread anti-Semitism campaign. Lindberghs victory is the first in a sequence of ruptures that threaten to ruin his little, secure corner of America—and with it, his mother, father, and elder brother—for a young boy growing up in Newark.