Zero K - Softcover

Delillo, Don

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501138057 ISBN 13: 9781501138058

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

The wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our time--an ode to language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life.
Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.
"We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?"
These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth."
Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world--terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague--against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun."
"Zero K" is glorious.

About this title

Review:

Both beautiful and profound, certainly DeLillo's best since Underworld, it forces us to confront the spectre of our own mortality, to ask deep questions of our motives in wishing to prolong our span on Earth. We finish the novel with a sudden recognition of the kindness of death, the balm of a bounded life (Observer)

DeLillo is one of urban life's most perceptive chroniclers (Independent)

DeLillo's 16th novel takes a sanguine and, as usual, perceptive look at life as it is now, beset by wars, terrorism and the catastrophic results of climate change, and balances them against the beauty and joy that can be involved in being human (Daily Mail)

Humanly moving . . . sentence by sentence brilliance of phrasing and cadence (Literary Review)

A kind of greatest-hits compilation of earlier motifs and gestures (London Review of Books)

Haunting. . . Simultaneously terrifying yet beautifully told with a real tenderness for the everyday details of life in New York. . . certainly not to be missed (GQ)

Very moving . . . his optimism is a welcome gift in this intense and deeply considered book (Prospect)

A visionary novel of ideas that remembers even visionary novels are read by living, breathing humans (Independent)

As he approaches 80, Don DeLillo is still producing work that channels America's tensions. . . supple and sad and oddly compassionate too; his most fully realised work in more than a decade (Guardian)

DeLillo's spare eloquence and the cosmic depression underlying it makes this emptiest of novels a rich reading experience (The Times)

From the Author:

Don DeLillo, the author of fifteen novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written three plays. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501138057
• ISBN 13: 9781501138058
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288