Cosmopolis

Description

Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target... An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis' Psycho, Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.

Don DeLillo is the acclaimed author of fifteen novels and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

America's greatest living writer. * Observer * A brilliant excursion into the decadence of contemporary culture. * Sunday Times * A prose-poem about New York . . . DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading . . . we ignore him at our peril. -- Blake Morrison * Guardian *