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2014 Longlist

A Hologram for the King

ABOUT
THE BOOK

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman 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 in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment-and a moving story of how we got here.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Dave
Eggers

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, How We Are Hungry, Short Short Stories, Teachers Have It Easy, Surviving Justice, What is the What, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, The Wild Things, Zeitoun, A Hologram for the King, The Circle and Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever?. A Hologram for the King and The Circle are both major film adaptations.

Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s independent publishing house, the 826 National network, and the nonprofit organisation ScholarMatch. He lives in Northern California with his family.

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity, The Unforbidden is Compulsory, How We Are Hungry, Short Short Stories, Teachers Have It Easy, Surviving Justice, What is the What, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, The Wild Things, Zeitoun, A Hologram for the King, The Circle and Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever?. A Hologram for the King and The Circle are both major film adaptations.

Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s independent publishing house, the 826 National network, and the nonprofit organisation ScholarMatch. He lives in Northern California with his family.

 

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Like a Waiting for Godot for the early 21st century, A Hologram for the King is the story of Alan Clay who is in Saudi Arabia awaiting a meeting with the King and a chance to redeem his life by selling him a piece of revolutionary software that will change how people communicate. The novel becomes a parable of both one man’s existential crisis, as he wrestles with regrets over his past personal failings, and of the global financial crisis, as Alan attempts to find a place for himself in an impersonal, post-industrial global economy.

A potent and well-drawn portrait of a man discovering how his personal and professional selves split and connect. A clear, supremely readable parable of the USA in the global economy. It is haunting, beautifully shaped and sad.

A beautiful, sad and comic look at America in the global economy, and how the world is remaking America. Businessman for the biggest IT company in America, Alan Clay has been working for 10 years in Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and China, where “the dreaming’s being done” now, is stuck day after day waiting in a tent in the desert for a Saudi Arabian king who fails to arrive. An allegorical story of globalism as it develops alongside one man’s loss of self-confidence.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
05/09/2013
Country
US
Author
Publisher
McSweeney’s Books

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