Underworld

Don DeLillo

1998 Nominee

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

24 November 2022
9781529092097
832 pages

Synopsis

Underworld opens – famously – at the Dodgers-Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling.

Don DeLillo loosely follows the fate of the winning baseball as the book swells and rolls through time. He offers a panoramic vision of America, defined by the overarching conflict of the cold war.

This is an awe-inspiring story, seen in deep, clear detail, of men and women, together and apart, as they search for meaning, survival and connection in the toughest of times.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic.
A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest.
Every decade or so the real thing comes along - a work of literature so overwhelmingly good that you know it is a masterpiece which will endure . . . huge sections sweep you along in a way that only the greatest books can.