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
