An epic novel combining fiction and history in a collaboration that encompasses fifty years of American history.
Review
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
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
DeLillo suddenly fills the sky. 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 heart: 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
Review
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
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
DeLillo suddenly fills the sky. 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 heart: 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
About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of many bestselling novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise, Libra and Zero K, and has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written several plays.