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A Hologram for the King

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the bestselling author of The Circle—a taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel that 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.

“An outstanding achievement in Eggers’s already impressive career, and an essential read.” —San Francisco Chronicle

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. A novel that’s a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment—and a moving story of how we got here.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 25, 2012
      Eggers's first unabashedly fictional, original novel in some time nonetheless grounds itself as firmly in the real world as Zeitoun or What is the What. Businessman Alan Clay has reached middle age with experience in manufacturing and door-to-door salesmanship considered almost wholly anachronistic and in post-industrial America, "as intriguing... as an airplane built from mud." Deeply in debt and unable to continue paying for his daughter Kit to go to college, Alan finds himself in Saudi Arabia awaiting the arrival of "the Kingdom's" elusive monarch for a chance to pitch his employer, Reliant, as the information technology supplier for a massive new King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) development. In limbo, Alan writes letters to Kit that he'll never mail, frets about his health (he's discovered a growth on his neck), and wrestles with insecurity over his past personal and business failings. This conflation of Waiting for Godot and Save the Tiger is unsurprising, if sympathetic, in its portrait of a global economy with all the solidity of a sandcastle. Eggers strikes fresh and genuine notes, however, in Alan's burgeoning friendship with the young Saudi man, Yousef, assigned to be his driver. Both Eggers's fans and those previously resistant to his work will find a spare but moving elegy for the American century.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 29, 2012
      In Eggers’s fourth novel, failed entrepreneur Alan Clay is recently divorced, deeply in debt, and struggling to pay for his daughter’s next expensive semester. When his latest business venture lands him in a soon-to-be prosperous city in Saudi Arabia, he must work to win a communications contract from an elusive king. Clay expects to stay a few days, but finds the project without an end date. Stranded in a desert purgatory, Clay drinks too much, sleeps too little, writes long e-mails to his daughter, reflects on the missteps that have led him astray in life, and, in his bleaker moments, performs surgery himself on a suspicious growth on the back of his neck. For a businessman hoping to salvage his career, it is a shaky new beginning. Narrator Dion Graham—who has previously read other Eggers titles—turns in a standout performance. His reading is clear, crisp, well paced, and thoroughly entertaining. He fluidly switches between dozens of dialects and creates unique voices for a host of characters. Eggers fans will be delighted. A McSweeney’s hardcover.

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