Do not be deterred. Fair warning, before you embark on the following few paragraphs and start to suspect, life being short, that Zero K may be too tricksy and impenetrable – aka “postmodern” – for a novel about that most medieval of preoccupations, death. Because while its examination of “Last Things”, “the end of the world” and, expressly, “eschatology” is intellectually ambitious (no surprise if you’ve read any of Don DeLillo’s 15 earlier novels), challenging (again, true to form) and not consistently successful (but perhaps that’s just me), ultimately it is life, not death, that it honours and commends.

Ross Lockhart, a Soros-style financier, has arranged for the cryogenic preservation of his second wife, Artis, at “the Convergence”, a self-funded, futuristic installation secreted somewhere in the anonymous, post-­apocalyptic wastes of a former Soviet state.