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
