Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover - and Bill's.

An extraordinary novel from Don DeLillo about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.