Point Omega - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

From one of the country's greatest living writers comes a brief, unnerving, and hard-hitting new novel about a secret war advisor and a young filmmaker.

Book Synopsis

A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it.

In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times calls "prophetic about twenty-first-century America" looks into the mind and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war.

We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker and by Elster's daughter Jessica--an "otherworldly" woman from New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

Review Quotes

"A novel of ideas -- about how language, film and art alter what we think of as reality. It's for readers ready to slow down and savor the words. It's for those who would watch not just Psycho, but ponder the meanings of '24 Hour Psycho'."--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"A splendid, fierce novel by a deep practitioner of the form.... Enlivening, challenging, harrowing and beautiful."--Matthew Sharpe, Los Angeles Times

"DeLillo has achieved a precision and economy of language here that any writer would envy."--David Ignatius, Washington Post Book World

"DeLillo is, without any doubt or qualification, one of the most influential, brilliant, gifted and insightful of American novelists. There are sentences in this book that are breathtaking."--Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

"Haunting... DeLillo slows down the whole culture, all of our repertoire of artifacts, words, and gestures."--Greil Marcus

"If Underworld was DeLillo's extravagant funeral for the twentieth century, Point Omega is the farewell party for the last decade.... DeLillo has .... written the first important novel of the year."--Michael Miller, New York Observer

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.