About the Book
A New York Times Notable Book and New York Times bestseller, "DeLillo's haunting new novel, Zero K--his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld" (The New York Times), is 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 "daring...provocative...exquisite" (The Washington Post) 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."
"One of the most mysterious, emotionally moving, and rewarding books of DeLillo's long career" (The New York Times Book Review), Zero K is a glorious, soulful novel from one of the great writers of our time.
About the Author :
Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. 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, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Review :
"Zero K demonstrates the electrifying possibilities of DeLillo's approach. . . . This is speculative fiction in the present tense written with an ardent concentration and economy, no superfluous words, not even a wasted comma. At its best, DeLillo's prose buzzes with the ambient hum of modernity, attuning the reader to a subliminal frequency, the hidden meanings of everyday objects and rituals."-- "Keith Watson, Slant Magazine"
"Zero K grapples with the fact our demise is profoundly at odds with this aspect of us that years to exceed every limitation. Circling around this irreconcilable dilemma, DeLillo finds a vital dialogue with his great work White Noise. It is this . . . that makes this book a provocative success."-- "Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle"
"Zero K is science fiction of a kind that takes place five minutes from now and a novel of ideas that's deeply emotional."-- "Jeff Baker, Seattle times"
"Zero K pushes its readers to feel. It is almost impossible to not. With its confluence of screens, strange artwork, empty rooms, long hallways, and shaved hands of those soon to be frozen, Zero K creates an experiment, and we, its subjects, feel pulled to interact."-- "The Millions"
"Zero K stands as the best of [DeLillo's] recent work. . . . The intense, penetrating DeLillo sentences are still here, but now with a touch of Beckett to wax their warp. DeLillo turns 80 in November, and Zero K is still years ahead of the rest of us."-- "Hal Hlavinka, Brooklyn Paper"
"[DeLillo is] the master of the pre-apocalyptic novel, the chief literary mapper of the dehumanized places our current world may lead us. [He] is near the top of his game in Zero K."-- "Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News"
"A return to top form . . . . this compact tale has more ideas, argument, and speculation stuffed onto nearly every page than you might find in an entire shelf of sci-fi novels. . . . But Zero K is anchored in emotions as old and primal as humanity itself: the fear of death, the passionate love of a man for his wife, the conflicted love of a son for his father. These rich veins of feeling flow like an underground river through the novel's eerie, futuristic terrain."-- "Kevin Nance, USA Today, 4 Stars"
"DeLillo's prose style has undergone a quickening. His sentences have always had a cascade effect, but lately their arc is steeper. Gravity has assumed more force. And [in Zero K] style and theme have something in common."-- "Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine"
"Like a stethoscope, Don DeLillo's work can make the heartbeat of your life roar in your ears. . . . In Zero K, DeLillo doesn't give the reader much room to suspend disbelief. With very deliberate words the novel wants to turn our eyes back to the artificial realities that we've allowed to colonize our lives. Our only chance, his fiction implies, is to define them, to master them with language -- lest we continuously be defined by our technology." -- "Chris Byrd, B&N Review"
"Mr. DeLillo's haunting new novel, Zero K -- his most persuasive since his astonishing 1997 masterpiece, Underworld -- is a kind of bookend to White Noise: somber and coolly futuristic, where that earlier book was satirical and darkly comic. . . . . All the themes that have animated Mr. DeLillo's novels over the years are threaded through Zero K -- from the seduction of technology and mass media to the power of money and the fear of chaos. . . . like a chamber music piece. . . . reminds us of his 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."-- "Michiko Kakutani, New York Times"
"Powerful. . . . Zero K may poke fun at life extension, but it gives us the warmest depicture of a DeLillo novel yet at the intimate reason for this perpetual Icarus complex. . . . the most powerful reason for this desire for transcendence is love, and as Zero K so poignantly reminds, love is one element that does not survive at subfreezing zero kelvin."-- "John Freeman, Boston Globe"
