From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.
Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.
It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.
Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.
What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.
'mysterious...Unexpectedly touching...[ DeLillo offers] consolation simply by enacting so well the mystery and awe of the real world.' 'Joshua Ferris, The New York Times Book Review
'DeLillo [ has] almost Dayglo powers as a writer.' 'Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
'Brilliant and astonishing'a masterpiece'manages to renew DeLillo's longstanding obsessions while also striking deeply and swiftly at the reader's emotions'the effect is transcendent.' 'Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
'Daring... provocative... exquisite...captures the swelling fears of our age."
'Ron Charles, The Washington Post
From the National Book Award'winning author of Underworld, a 'daring'provocative'exquisite' (The Washington Post) novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.
It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.
Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.
What follows is a 'brilliant and astonishing'masterpiece' (Chicago Tribune) about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language, the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world. "DeLillo's shrewd, darkly comic observations about the extravagance and alienation of contemporary life can still slice like a scalpel' (Entertainment Weekly).
"In this wry and cutting meditation on collective loss, a rupture severs us, suddenly, from everything we've come to rely on. The Silence seems to absorb DeLillo's entire body of work and sand it into stone or crystal.' 'Rachel Kushner
