The Silence

The Silence

From one of the most dazzling and essential voices in American fiction, a timely and compelling novel set in the near future about five people gathered together in a Manhattan apartment, in the midst of a catastrophic event.

Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

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 dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo’s prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.

Title : The Silence
ISBN : 9781982164553
Format Type :

    The Silence Reviews

  • s.penkevich

    ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’Ludwig WittgensteinDon DeLillo has a special ability to find the pulse of modern anxieties in the moment and use it like a metronym to which ...

  • Angela M

    Don DeLillo is still giving his readers something to think about in this short, yet powerful book. It’s ominous; even the cover is somewhat haunting - black background except for a slender cell phon...

  • Violet wells

    "This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the ...

  • George

    The Silence begins with the following epigraph from Albert Einstein:“I do not know with what weaponsWorld War III will be fought,but World War IV will be foughtwith sticks and stones.”Perhaps over...

  • Elyse Walters

    “Life can get so interesting, that we forget to be afraid”“Cyber attacks, digital intrusions,, biological aggressions, smallpox, terrorism, financial collapse, dead, disabled, starvation, plagu...

  • Meike

    This novella - written pre-Corona - deals with, yes, a shutdown, in this case a shutdown of technology. It's Super Bowl Tuesday 2022, the grid goes down and millions of viewers are suddenly staring in...

  • Darwin8u

    "Ere the sockson locked at the dure."- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake"We were headed in this direction. No more wonder, no more curiosity. Totally impaired orientation. Too much of everything from too na...

  • Ron Charles

    The kindest response to Don DeLillo’s new novel, “The Silence,” may be suggested by its title. But this is the author of such modern classics as “White Noise,” “Libra” and “Underworld,...

  • Henk

    Impressionistic and detached, with some nice sentences and scenes, but an unclear purpose and ending to it Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraidDependence on technology seems to be t...

  • Scott

    "Nobody wants to call it World War III, but this is what it is." -- Martin, on page 79Unremarkable novella, set in early 2022, that focuses on five connected people - one married couple returning home...