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.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white collar prison and outer space, this is a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice --- from the rich, startling, jazz-infused sentences of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories.