The Zero, Jess Walter
The Zero, Jess Walter
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The Zero
A Novel

Author: Jess Walter

Narrator: Christopher Graybill

Abridged: 10 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/19/2006

Synopsis

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 scene—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, and peopled by gawking celebrities, anguished policemen, and 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. 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.Performed by Christopher Graybill

About Jess Walter

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on October 15, 2019

I admired the Jess Walter books I’ve read previously (Citizen Vince, Beautiful Ruins, We All Live in Water, and especially The Financial Lives of Poets), but none of them prepared me for the level of gobsmacked I feel after reading The Zero, a nightmarish tale of a cop-turned-agent for a spooky gove......more

Goodreads review by Julie on January 28, 2016

I've actively avoided the 9/11 novel. I read a couple in the early years, I can't even tell you which they were (oh, if I thought about it, I'd come up with the titles, but that's not the point) but they pissed me off and so I vowed to make a wide berth around the ouevre. Ian McEwan's chilling and i......more

Goodreads review by Jason on December 03, 2009

my review: this book kicked ass. my top five interesting bits learned from having jess walter come to my form & theory class to discuss "the zero": 1. nicole, the real estate boss, speaks in "bush-ism"s, and the bits you see in the book represent about a 70% reduction in those phrases from what earlie......more

Goodreads review by Tom LA on April 01, 2018

As some other reviewes here, I absolutely love Jess Walter and I think he's one of the very best authors around (not only in Spokane, WA... in the world). This book has many layers, and - like other reviewers - I'm afraid I could fully understand these layers only after having read Walter's own comm......more

Goodreads review by Steve on May 13, 2010

This may be perverse, but part of the appeal of this book was in trying to figure out what makes it worthwhile despite seeming to be so ungrounded. As a benchmark for contrast, Walter’s award winner from a few years before, Citizen Vince, was unambiguously good —- and good in a straightforward way.......more

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