Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
“A great American novel” (
San Francisco Chronicle
) that spans five decades of American history, following the intimate lives of the men and women who lived through them.
It begins with a moment of legend: the 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in which the winning homerun known as the Shot Heard Round the World coincides with news of the Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb test.
The baseball itself, scuffed and passed from hand to hand, becomes the thread that weaves an astonishing tapestry that spans the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam protests, and beyond, telling the story of Nick Shay, Klara Sax, and the hidden histories of a nation both haunted and illuminated by its past.
Sweeping yet intimate,
Underworld
is an astonishing story of men and women brought together and torn apart against the backdrop of half a century of American history.