Dr. No

A Novel

By: Percival Everett

Narrated by: Amir Abdullah

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he'll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.

With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill's desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, "Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back."

©2022 Percival Everett (P)2022 Tantor

This book is about Nothing!

Well written featuring unique and interesting characters. I very much enjoyed and had lots of laugh at loud moments.

love love love

I liked everything about this work including the performance . Nothing was wrong.

Silly, Dry, and Brilliant

This title was well written and well read. The author did an amazing job at telling a silly story with ridiculous characters that were captured perfectly by the performer.

The author does an excellent job telling the story from an African American perspective without resorting to stereotypes.

DR. Alright

I am enjoying the narrator of this book, the author, Everett. I am starting to believe that it is the narration that makes the book—I need to read one to change my opinion. The plot flows well, and I really enjoy the characters. It is an excellent novel, and I highly recommend it.

Silly

Narrator was great other than his Beavis and Butthead impersonation of the female character. In fact, I find it hard to imagine reading the book without the accents and character renditions in the audio.
A long silly ride to nowhere with a few funny moments. His new book, James is great though.

(Ian Fleming + Vonnegut) +/- J-P Sartre = 0

Reads like a Vonnegut novel playing with the math and the philosophy of nothing, nadda, 0, ∅. The book is set up like an Ian Fleming novel, but is absurd from the beginning to the end. No climax, of course, just nothing. Major targets are race, academia, government, and clearly the United States of Nothing. It was charming and silly, but not Everett's tightest work. But still, I hung around until there was, yup, nothing left to read. Also, Everett is a master at lyrics, poems and limericks.

Great Book!

Loved this book, I saw the negative reviews and have no idea what those people are taking about. Smart, silly, and exciting with great characters and a fantastic performance by Abdullah.

Best book I’ve read in a while.

It’s just such a unique idea. It had my brain doing backflips. You never really get black super villains. And the texture to the world building can be felt

Fun but Pretentious

There's a whole lot of nothing here, and that's a good thing... well, maybe not. Let me ask a one-legged dog. He showed me a pickel and referenced some obtuse math metaphor, which I agreed was correct. Then I woke up and got hired to help a super villain. My life quickly went from nothing to nothing. I would say more nothing, but the one-legged dog would scold me.

If the above paragraph seems like fun to you, then check out this book. Also the reader does an AMAZING job, definitely enhanced the book by double.

Well…

It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. There are a lot of words and spaces between the words but it doesn’t amount to anything. When I think about what I’ve heard, nothing comes to mind.