Books with author Kurt Vonnegut

Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it ...Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to mankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh.

Cat's Cradle deals with atomic scientists, ugly Americans, gorgeous sex queens, vengeful midgets, Caribbean dictators, undertakers, Hoosiers, a new way of making love, ice-nine, Bokononism, the end of the world...Ice-nine? Bokononism? The end of the world? No one but Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., could have created this masterful mix of satire, fantasy and all-too-real realism. An ultimate commentary on modern man and his madness, Cat's Cradle is one of the most brilliant and important novels of the decade.

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America's master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry-and all that is worth saving.

Player Piano tells the story of a man named Paul Proteus. He lives sometime in the not-too-distant future in the United States, in the aftermath of a grand world war which has given birth to a massive mechanization of the entire country. His father pioneered the birth of the society and he is following in his father's footsteps as a major manager of a plant in Ilium: futuristic New York. He becomes more and more dissatisfied with what turns out to be their very unfair and unfulfilling new way of life, and finally drops his former life as a plant manager to take part in a revolution against the authority. He is swept along with the events of their rebellion entirely out of his control, and at the end of the novel, they appear to be successful in disshelving the machines- but with the dreary reminder that they will always eventually return, and history will come full circle once more.