Synopsis
Jeffrey Lockhart has been summoned to The Convergence: a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely, cryogenically controlled.
He is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, who has chosen to surrender her dying body; preserving it until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return her to a life of transcendent promise.
And his healthy father, Ross, might join her.
Hypnotic and seductive, Don DeLillo's Zero K is a visionary novel about the legacies we leave, the nobility of death, and the ultimate worth of 'the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.'
Details
23 February 2017
288 pages
9781509822843
Imprint: Picador
Reviews
“A return to full realization for DeLillo. . .Deserves to win old and new readers alike. A marvellous blend of DeLillo's enormous gifts; his bleak humour and edged insight, the alertness and vitality of his prose, the vast, poetic extrapolations are all evident. So is the visceral quickness and wit in the sentences”Sam Lipsyte
“[DeLillo's] most persuasive [novel] since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld . . . Zero K reminds us of Mr. DeLillo's almost Day-Glo powers as a writer and his understanding of the strange, contorted shapes that eternal human concerns (with mortality and time) can take in the new millennium'”Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Sentence by sentence, DeLillo magically slips the knot of criticism and gives his readers what Nabokov maintained was all that mattered in life and art: individual genius. Sentence by sentence, DeLillo seduces . . . DeLillo has written a handful of the past half-century's finest novels. Now, as he approaches 80, he gives us one more, written distinctly for the 21st”Joshua Ferris, New York Times
“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, Observer
