The wisest richest funniest and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo one of the
great American novelists of our time-an ode to language at the heart of our humanity 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 seductive
spectacularly observed and brilliant 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. Zero K is glorious.
