Synopses & Reviews
A National Book Award Finalist
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
One of the Best Books of the Year from The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle
In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together.
Review
"A Hologram for the King...reads fast and clear, with clean, stripped-down prose and a tone at once mournful and darkly amused....It’s not that this world is changing, or that it will change. The world already changed, and now everyone, whether they like it or not, is tasked with figuring out how—or if—they can adapt." Portland Mercury
Review
"Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman....The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate." The Chicago Tribune
Review
"Solidly constructed and elegantly told. There is nothing inaccessible about it....Clay may not be like each of us, but he is an everyman whose irrelevancy is parallel to America’s own." Los Angeles Times
Review
"A novel poised on the central meridian of our times....Eggers maintains an exquisite balance of irony, empathy, dark humor, and unexpected tenderness in this taut exploration of the ever-increasing price of ordinary survival. A book as heartbreaking as the global economy it explores with such beauty and ferocity." National Book Awards citation
Review
"A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man's travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times." The New York Times
Review
"Dave Eggers is a prince among men. . . . A strike against the current state of global economic injustice." Vanity Fair
Review
"[A] clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped, and sad....A story human enough to draw blood…. Groundbreaking." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"A Hologram for the King is an outstanding achievement in Eggers’s already impressive career, and an essential read." San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers lives in Northern California with his family.