Cryptonomicon

<p><strong>With this extraordinary first volume in an epoch-making masterpiece Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.</strong></p><p>In 1942 Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse--mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy--is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702--commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.</p><p>Fast-forward to the present where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson Randy is attempting to create a data haven in Southeast Asia--a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter Amy to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.</p><p>A breathtaking tour de force and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date <em>Cryptonomicon</em> is profound and prophetic hypnotic and hyper-driven as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.</p>