Dr. No
the satirical spy thriller from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of James
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2.9 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Dr. No is the spy thriller as you've never read it before! Reinvented by Percival Everett, the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees and James.
'Clever, funny and mercilessly satirical.' – The Times
Wala Kitu is a professor of mathematics at Brown University, specializing in nothing. Kitu is content with nothing – studying it, having it, doing it – until his research places him in the sights of billionaire and would-be Bond villain John Sill, who enlists the professor’s help to steal a deposit of nothing from Fort Knox and use it to reduce the United States of America to nothing.
Sill wants vengeance for another act of all-American villainy: the murder of his father, a witness to the state-sanctioned assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. His mission is everything: ‘This country has never given anything to us and it never will.'
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Read Percival's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James in paperback now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The immensely enjoyable latest from Booker-shortlisted Everett (The Trees) sends up spy movie tropes while commenting on racism in the U.S. The narrator is Wala Kitu, a Black mathematics professor researching the substance of "nothing," which yields endless clever riffs (in his search for nothing, he has "nothing to show for it"). Kitu is recruited by John Sill, a Black billionaire and aspiring supervillain hoping to use the power of "nothing" to terrify the nation, all in retaliation for the murder of his parents by a white police chief. Intrigued by the possibilities of furthering his research, Kitu joins Sill and is whisked to a Miami lair to begin plotting the attack on Fort Knox, which Sill claims contains no gold, just a powerful "nothing." Along for the ride is Kitu's sheltered white colleague, topologist Eigen Vector, whom Sill drugs into becoming his arm candy. As Kitu learns more about Sill's plan and witnesses his ruthlessness, he tries to escape and save Eigen. Another Sill associate, Gloria, a Black woman with an "enormous afro" who also seems to be under Sill's spell, tells Kitu her brother was shot for "standing around being Black." Throughout, Everett boldly makes a farce out of real-world nightmares, and the rapid-fire pacing leaves readers little time to blink. Satire doesn't get much sharper or funnier than this.
