It's a stunningly eventful day in the life of Eric Packer, a multi-billionaire who owns a forty-eight-room apartment and a decommissioned nuclear bomber and who has recently married the heiress of a vast European fortune. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across the middle of Manhattan, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding through town, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups.

Eric's bodyguards are worried that he is a target and, indeed, he is -- although the danger, as it ... Read moreturns out, is not from protesters or political assassins but from an anonymous man who lives in an abandoned building.

'De Lillo makes you realize just how exhilarating reading a book ought to be' Daily Express

'DeLillo shapes a rhetoric for our age' Observer