Underworld

Underworld opens – famously – at the Dodgers-Giants 1951 National League final, where Bobby Thomson hits The Shot Heard Round the World and wins the pennant race for the Giants. But on the other side of the planet, another highly significant shot was fired: the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling.Don DeLillo loosely follows the fate of the winning baseball as the book swells and rolls through time. He offers a panoramic vision of America, defined by the overarching conflict of the cold war.This is an awe-inspiring story, seen in deep, clear detail, of men and women, together and apart, as they search for meaning, survival and connection in the toughest of times.Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic., A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest., Every decade or so the real thing comes along - a work of literature so overwhelmingly good that you know it is a masterpiece which will endure . . . huge sections sweep you along in a way that only the greatest books can., His longest, most ambitious, and most complicated novel - and his best . . . Underworld is the black comedy of the Cold War; it is full of sentences that capture, with the choice of the odd word, a moment in American history., Astonishing . . . an amazing performance . . . Mr DeLillo's most affecting novel yet . . . This bravura master of cerebral pyrotechnics also knows how to seize and rattle our emotions . . . In this remarkable novel, [DeLillo] has taken the effluvia of modern society, all the detritus of our daily and political lives, and turned it into a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art.

Don DeLillo is the acclaimed author of many bestselling novels, including Underworld, White Noise and Libra, and several plays. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

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