Underworld
24 November 2022Synopsis
Underworld 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 fired: the USSR's first atomic detonation. And so begins a masterpiece of gloriously symphonic storytelling.
Don 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.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
Details
24 November 2022
9781529092097Reviews
A literary colossus, equal to any (and surpassing most) of the vaulting novels which strive for the immensity of the American mythic.Geoff Dyer, Sunday Telegraph
A rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department - dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity and the rest.William Boyd, Observer
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 . . . huge sections sweep you along in a way that only the greatest books can.Michael Shelden, Daily Telegraph
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
