The Silence

From the National Book Award–winning author of Underworld, a novel about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a story about what makes us human. Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of the Covid pandemic. His language and the dazzle of his sentences offer a kind of solace in our bewildering world.