Mercy of a Rude Stream

Mercy of a Rude Stream Synopsis

'A landmark of the American literary century' Boston Globe

Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth returned with Mercy of a Rude Stream - a sequence of four internationally-acclaimed epic novels of immigrant life in early-twentieth century New York.

In Henry Roth's extraordinary novel we are introduced to Ira Stigman and his dazzlingly-evoked immigrant world of New York's Jewish Harlem. It is 1914 and the news of the outbreak of war is the first of many events to impinge on Ira's life and that of his family. Here is a boy struggling with racism, with his raging and unpredictable father, with the unsettling emergence of sexuality and with a world in the grip of momentous change.

'The literary comeback of the century' Vanity Fair

'As unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates' Sunday Times

'A dynamic and moving event . . . a stirring portrait of a vanished culture . . . a poignant chapter in the life-drama of a unique American writer' Newsweek

'Although it is sixty years since a new novel by Mr Roth last hit the bookshelves, it has been worth the wait' The Economist

'Fresh and touching' Wall Street Journal

'A precision of detail which brings the sounds from the tenements, the heat of the sidewalk steaming off the pages' Sunday Express

'A meticulous evocation of a now-distant episode of the American experience' New York Times Book Review

Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes
1) A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park
2) A Diving Rock on the Hudson
3) From Bondage
4) Requiem for Harlem.