Zero K

Jeffrey Lockhart has been summoned to The Convergence: a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely, cryogenically controlled.He is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, who has chosen to surrender her dying body; preserving it until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return her to a life of transcendent promise. And his healthy father, Ross, might join her.Hypnotic and seductive, Don DeLillo's Zero K is a visionary novel about the legacies we leave, the nobility of death, and the ultimate worth of 'the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.'

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, DeLillo is one of urban life's most perceptive chroniclers, 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, Humanly moving . . . sentence by sentence brilliance of phrasing and cadence, A kind of greatest-hits compilation of earlier motifs and gestures

Don DeLillo, the author of numerous novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written several plays.