Libra

Description

The gripping American classic, now a Penguin Essential Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Friday, November 22, 1963. 12.30 PM. Shots ring out. A president dies. And a nation is plunged into psychosis. Don DeLillo's extraordinary Libra is a brilliant reimagining of the events and people surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Concentrating on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald, some rogue former spooks unhappy with Kennedy's presidency, and Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist, trying to make sense of or draw inferences from the mass of information after the assassination, Libra presents an unapologeticly provocative picture of America in the second half of the last century.

Don DeLillo was born and raised in New York City. He has written fifteen novels and three stage plays and has won many honours including the National Book Award for White Noise, the International Fiction Prize for Libra, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Mao II, the Jerusalem Prize, the Howells Medal for Underworld and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

An unparalleled trip into the heart of America * Observer * Wonderful * Guardian * Even with all the swirling contradictory data, this you feel is America, and the news starts here * Sunday Times * Monumental, DeLillo at his chilling best. Concentrates on the inner life of the people who shaped the Kennedy assassination. He constructs the very human faces behind a monstrous event, creating fiction which trespasses on reality * Time Out * An audacious blend of fiction and fact * The Times *