Underworld(1997)

Don DeLillo

An epic novel combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years of American history."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" Michael Shelden, Daily TelegraphUnderworld 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 the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling. 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.PRAISE FOR UNDERWORLD"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." New Yorker"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." New York Times"Don DeLillo's latest epic, Underworld, brilliantly interweaves voices, incidents and telling details into a moving, empowering people's history. If Libra, White Noise and Mao II hadn't already done enough to persuade British readers that DeLillo ranks with the best of contemporary American novelists, Underworld surely will." Blake Morrison, Independent on Sunday"Underworld renders DeLillo a great novelist . . . [it] surges with magisterial confidence through time (the last half-century) and through space (Harlem, Phoenix, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Texas, the Bronx) . . . It isn't every day, or even every decade, that one sees the ascension of a great writer." Martin Amis, Esquire"Among other things, the new novel from Don DeLillo is a remarkable feat of engineering . . . he chisels and carves until he has made something that cannot help but lift your a cathedral of prose . . . He has built a towering structure and I recommend you climb to the top. The view is sensational." Allison Pearson, Evening Standard"With Underworld, DeLillo confirms himself in the select group of great American writers truly equal to the temper of very strange times." Times Literary Supplement"Underworld is nothing less than the story of the States in the Cold War; an epic to set alongside Moby Dick or Augie March." Tim Adams, Observer