Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Every
work by DeLillo is literary news, and the urgency and catalyzing
relevance of this concise, disquieting novel will exponentially
accelerate interest."
Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"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
Review
"DeLillo applies
his mastery of dialogue to a spare, contemplative story....In the end,
readers gain the timely insight that some were born ready for disaster
while others remain unequipped..."
Publisher's Weekly
About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including
White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and
Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for
his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection
The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the
PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the
Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the
National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters.