Cat’s Cradle

The world is going to end. The Bokononists have a religion that admits it is all lies — and is therefore, paradoxically, the most honest religion available. The ice-nine is in a briefcase, and when it reaches water, all the water on earth will freeze. And Frank Hoenikker, the son of the man who built the atomic bomb, is making a deal with a Caribbean dictator that will determine the fate of the species.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is one of the great satirical novels of the twentieth century — funnier than it has any right to be about the end of the world, more moving than satire is supposed to be, and more formally inventive than either of those things might suggest. It is the novel that introduced Bokononism — a fictional religion whose sacred texts are entirely composed of comforting lies — and the concept of the karass, a group of people unknowingly working together toward a common destiny.

Essential Vonnegut. Essential American literature. A novel that makes you laugh, then think, then feel something you cannot quite name. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.