Even Martin Amis was shocked by the sex in this late-era Roth – he said he flicked through looking for the clean bits – but this tale of the puppeteer Mickey Sabbath is more than just an experiment in the outrageously perverse. Sabbath is an unforgiving Prospero, his magic faded, raging against death. It has one of the best final lines in modern literature: “How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here”.