New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
The wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don
DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our time--an ode to
language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death, and an
embrace of life.
Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a
younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the
primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is
exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when
biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of
transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say
"an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.
"We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same
manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?"
These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable
characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep
need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son,
this is indefensible. Jeff, the book's narrator, is committed to living,
to experiencing "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth."
Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel
weighs the darkness of the world--terrorism, floods, fires, famine,
plague--against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe,
"the intimate touch of earth and sun."
Zero K is glorious.
