Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, 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. We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate? These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters. Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world-terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague - against the beauty and humanity of everyday life.