Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the dazzling novel about the temptations of an alternative life. The Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies. Illuminating these lives in free-fall and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey; a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire; a church in London's West End; or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank. PRAISE FOR THE COUNTERLIFE 'Wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense' - Martin Amis 'Boisterously serious.fizzing and formally audacious' - Julian Barnes.