Underworld

Underworld by Don DeLillo is a sprawling 1997 novel that traces the improbable journey of a baseball from the famous 1951 New York Giants pennant-winning home run hit by Bobby Thomson, intertwining its fate with the life of Nick Shay, a Bronx-raised waste management executive obsessed with tracking it down. Spanning decades of post-World War II American history, the non-linear narrative weaves subplots involving Cold War nuclear anxieties, consumerism, art, crime, and personal reckonings—featuring characters like artist Klara Sax, Nick’s former lover, and a nun witnessing urban miracles—while probing how individual lives connect to vast historical forces, waste as metaphor, and the elusive nature of truth and memory.