The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our
times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph
Heller.
From its opening pages—when hero cop
Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter
takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the
aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy
finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and
days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape
around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a
Machiavellian mayor known as "The Boss," and peopled by gawking
celebrities, anguished policemen peddling First Responder cereal, and pink real
estate divas hyping the spoils of tragedy. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he
doesn't know, a son who pretends he's dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a
trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency known as the Department
of Documentation. Whether that trail will lead Remy to an elusive terror
cell—or send him circling back to himself—is only one of the questions posed by
this provocative yet deeply human novel.
From a novelist of astounding
talent, The Zero is an extraordinary story of how our trials become our
transgressions, of how we forgive ourselves and whether or not we should.
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