Falling Man

About This Audiobook

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man isn’t a book about the towers. It’s about the air that lingers after they fall—a fine, gray particulate that settles on everything, impossible to ignore yet somehow unspoken. The novel tracks Keith, a 9/11 survivor who walks away from the dust cloud with only a briefcase and no memory of his wife Lianne’s voice on the phone. Over months, he drifts through casinos and apartments like a man who’s already dead, while Lianne clings to routine, haunted by the stranger in her building who hangs upside down from a window ledge, a performance artist staging free falls in tribute (or mockery) of the day. DeLillo’s prose is glacial, precise; he lingers on the sound of a pilot light clicking on in an empty kitchen, the way grief curdles into something functional, something you carry like a second skin. This isn’t a story about closure—it’s about the slow erosion of the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

Narrated by John Slattery, the audiobook becomes an exercise in restraint. His Keith is a void given voice—flat, affectless, the kind of man who would order a scotch neat and not look at the bartender. Slattery’s Lianne is softer, but not warm; she’s a woman reciting the same lines to her son about the clouds looking like dragons, her voice fraying at the edges. The production enhances the eerie stillness; breaths between sentences feel like silences in a waiting room. This isn’t a book that yells. It whispers, and Slattery ensures you lean in to hear it.