Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis follows Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire asset manager, as he crosses Manhattan in a white stretch limousine to get a haircut.

As he rolls, markets convulse, protest gathers, technology hums, and his own life begins to detach from ordinary reality. It is a short, strange, cold novel about money as atmosphere, power as insulation, and the modern self dissolving into screens, speculation and appetite.

Written in DeLillo’s clipped, eerie, hyper-controlled style, Cosmopolis feels like system failure observed from inside the machine. Finance, sex, death, data, luxury and threat all compress into one slow city crossing: a sleek little apocalypse with leather seats.

Picador hardback edition, 2003. Originally published by Scribner in the same year. Light general shelf wear to covers and edges; pages clean, binding sound.