Zero K

Author Don DeLillo
Narrator Thomas Sadoski
Publisher Pan Macmillan
Run Time 7 hours and 51 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Dystopian and utopian fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: Interior life.

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What to expect

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."

Read by Thomas Sadoski, Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant novel Zero K 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."

Critics Review

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
DeLillo is one of urban life’s most perceptive chroniclers
Independent
DeLillo’s 16th novel takes a sanguine and, as usual, perceptive look at life as it is now, beset by wars, terrorism and the catastrophic results of climate change, and balances them against the beauty and joy that can be involved in being human
Daily Mail
Humanly moving . . . sentence by sentence brilliance of phrasing and cadence
Literary Review
A kind of greatest-hits compilation of earlier motifs and gestures
London Review of Books
Haunting. . . Simultaneously terrifying yet beautifully told with a real tenderness for the everyday details of life in New York. . . certainly not to be missed
GQ
Very moving . . . his optimism is a welcome gift in this intense and deeply considered book
Prospect
A visionary novel of ideas that remembers even visionary novels are read by living, breathing humans
Independent
As he approaches 80, Don DeLillo is still producing work that channels America’s tensions. . . supple and sad and oddly compassionate too; his most fully realised work in more than a decade
Guardian
DeLillo’s spare eloquence and the cosmic depression underlying it makes this emptiest of novels a rich reading experience
The Times
Time has done nothing to diminish this writer’s casually epigraphic style, his daring narrative choreography nor his sensitivity to the swelling fears of our age . . . truly provocative’
The Washington Post
[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’
New York Times
Brilliant in its imaginative scope
The Atlantic
Among DeLillo’s finest work . . . DeLillo sneaks a heartbreaking story of a son attempting to reconnect with his father into his thought-provoking novel
Publishers Weekly
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
New York Times
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
As ever, DeLillo explores the depths of an edgy, timely topic, completely resisting cliché, and emerges with something both fresh and universal
The Huffington Post
The reigning poet of unease, DeLillo has always understood the greatest disquiet — our mortality — and how our sense of it coats the surfaces of day-to-day life with a film, something DeLillo peels back at last in this bravura new novel about cryogenic life extension, family, and the losses we can’t overcome
Boston Globe
In his most funereal novel, DeLillo describes a wealthy man determined to save his dying wife by keeping her frozen in cryonic suspension for millennia. The trademark DeLillo themes are coolly updated for the Internet age
Washington Post
Zero K is a fascinating, unsettling novel about the uncertainties of humanity’s future
Independent
The novel I liked best was Don DeLillo’s Zero K for its sombre tones, its perfect cadences and its rich storyline
Irish Independent

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