Staff Pick
Two men pave a road linking a country after a civil war. The road is straight and unblemished, but their path in Eggers’s driving narrative is full of bumps and blind curves. The question is: What is the endpoint of a road paved with indifferent intentions? Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From the bestselling author of The Monk of Mokha and The Circle comes a taut, suspenseful story of two foreigners’ role in a nation’s fragile peace.
An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence. With echoes of J. M. Coetzee and Graham Greene, this timeless novel questions whether we can ever understand another nation’s war, and what role we have in forging anyone’s peace.
Review
“The ever-incisive, worldly-wise, compassionate, and imaginative Eggers maintains the tension of a cocked crossbow in this magnetizing, stealthily wry, and increasingly chilling tale.” Booklist
Review
“Eggers… may be the only living American writer for whom the term ‘Hemingway-esque’ meaningfully applies…. Eggers ably weaves in a host of ethical questions over one man’s responsibility to the other, what makes help transactional versus simply kind…. An unassuming but deceptively complex morality play, as Eggers distills his ongoing concerns into ever tighter prose.” Kirkus
Review
“In The Parade, the anxiety grows with every page and every mile to reach an ending that turns everything upside down and sends us into the heart of darkness. A minimalistic, merciless novel. A powerful allegory and a painfully concrete contemporary story — Eggers is a true virtuoso of that synthesis.” Georgi Gospodinov, author of The Physics of Sorrow
Review
“This is a tale for our time, an allegory about intervening in foreign lands without knowledge, and so a nightmare vision of our endless wars.” Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell
Review
“A parable of progress, as told by J.M. Coetzee to Philip K. Dick.” Richard Flanagan, author of Gould’s Book of Fish and The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Review
“The Parade is a heartbreaker and a mindbender. It is a novel of ideas that packs an emotional punch that left me reeling. With clear, unadorned prose, Eggers lays bare the costs of war, and of peace.” Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
About the Author
Dave Eggers is the author of many books, including The Monk of Mokha; Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets? Do They Live Forever, shortlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award; A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; and What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Médicis Etranger. He is the founder of McSweeney’s Publishing and cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a youth writing center with a pirate-supply storefront, which has inspired similar programs around the world. ScholarMatch, now ten years old, connects donors with students to make college possible for all. In 2018 he cofounded the International Congress of Youth Voices, a global gathering of writers and activists under twenty. He is a winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.