Nemesis, by Philip Roth (Vintage International)

It's the summer of 1944 in Roth's suspenseful novel, and a polio epidemic has taken hold of a Newark neighborhood. With fear and suspicion spreading as fast as the disease, a young playground director and military reject named Bucky Cantor turns the outbreak into his own patriotic battleground. Nemesis is "suffused with precise and painful tenderness", Leah Hager Cohen writes. "The narration is evocative of a Greek chorus, at once communal and all-knowing."

China Daily-New York Times