Picador to publish new DeLillo with echoes of Covid-19 crisis

Picador has landed The Silence, a new novel by Don Delillo about a catastrophic event with echoes of the Covid-19 crisis.

Kris Doyle, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Andrew Nurnberg at Andrew Nurnberg Associates, acting in conjunction with the Robin Straus Agency. The book will be released in hardback, audio and e-book on 29th October 2020.

The 128-page novel – DeLillo's 17th — is about five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday 2022, when “an unknown catastrophic event renders the digital world silent”.

Picador said: “With echoes of the sudden, isolating effects  of the coronavirus, The Silence is a powerful work about what it means to be human from one of the most  highly decorated, dazzling, and essential voices in American fiction.”

DeLillo explained: “I began writing the novel in 2018, long before the current pandemic. I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan. The idea of the silence grew from  sentence  t o sentence, from one chapter to   the next.”

Doyle commented: “The Silence is not a Covid novel, but it features a catastrophe with uncanny parallels to the present moment: this will come as no surprise to his many readers, DeLillo has been ahead of the curve for decades. He writes with such frightening perception that his work can feel like prophecy; yet this is a novel about human connection in a digital age that will feel timeless for as long as we continue to live with this technology. An enormously exciting addition to Picador’s publishing for this autumn.”

In the US, The Silence will be published simultaneously by Scribner and as an audio edition by Simon & Schuster Audio on 20th October 2020.