New from Dave Eggers, National Book Award finalist A Hologram for the King. 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, & 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 & his splintering family together in the face of the global economy`s gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, & elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment
- & a moving story of how we got here. Praise for A Hologram for the King: ” Absorbing.. .modest & equally satisfying: the writing of a comic but deeply affecting tale about one man`s travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times”. (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). ”A fascinating novel”. (New Yorker). ”A spare but moving elegy for the American century”. (Publishers Weekly). ” Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, & in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman... The novel operates on a grand & global scale, but it also is intimate”. (Chicago Tribune). ” Completely engrossing”. (Fortune). ” Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes”. (Los Angeles Times). Dave Eggers is the author of six previous books: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, How We Are Hungry, You Shall Know Our Velocity, What is the What, The Wild Things & Zeitoun. Zeitoun was the winner of the American Book Award & the Dayton Literary Peace Prize & What is the What was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award & won France`s Prix Medicis. Eggers is the founder & editor of Mc Sweeney`s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco. A native of Chicago, he lives in Northern California with his wife & two children.
...

` It was the start of my second new life, in a city that had a spin of its own
- a wilder orbit inside the earth`s calm blue-green
...

When George Alagiah was dropped off at a Hampshire boarding school as a child back in 1967 he was confronted with an extreme version of the private struggle faced by all immigrants
- the battle to leave the past behind & fit into a new culture. His arrival in Britain coincided with the unhappy intrusion of race into politics. A key part of the ensuing fight against racism was the concept of multiculturalism. But in a closely argued & forthright chapter, Alagiah suggests that, far from improving the prospects for some immigrants, multiculturalism may be an impediment to integration. All too often these are the poor & isolated communities who most need the help of the state to break out of what is fast becoming a version of ghetto life. Above all, this book is a tender & evocative portrayal of the immigrant experience. Alagiah brings colour & life to a subject that is too often reduced to screaming tabloid headlines, & sheds light on the controversial question of British identity.
...

A young refugee`s story of terror, love & survival. Melissa Fleming`s tale of a young Syrian woman`s search for peace & safety is a book written for our times. Fleming captures the unremitting fear, the crushing despair, & the glint of hope for a better life that drive families to risk everything & sail the treacherous seas. On every page, loss & hope tangle. On every page, the human toll of the worst humanitarian crisis of our time is painfully, heartbreakingly brought home. This is an emotional read, at times painful, but it is above all a poignant tribute to hope, to resilience, & to the capacity for grace & generosity that dwells deep in the human heart (Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner) ...

This is the story of Doaa, an ordinary girl from a village in Syria, who in 2015 became one of five hundred people crammed on to a fishing boat setting sail for Europe. The boat was deliberately capsized, & of those five hundred people, eleven survived; they were rescued four days after the boat sank. Doaa was one of them
- her fiancee Bassem, with whom she had fled, was not; he drowned in front of her. Melissa Fleming, the Chief Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, heard about Doaa & the death of 489 of her fellow refugees on the day she was pulled out of the water. She decided to fly to Crete to meet this extraordinary girl, who had rescued a toddler when she was nearly dead herself. They struck an instant bond, & Melissa saw in Doaa the story of the war in Syria embodied by one young woman. She has decided to tell Doaa`s story
- the dangers she fled, & the journey she risked to escape the conflagration in her homel&. Doaa is the face of the millions of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters & sons who risk everything as they try to escape war, violence & death. Doaa`s story will revolutionize how we see the thousands of people who die every year in search of a home. It will squarely face one of the greatest moral questions of our age: will we let more people die in boats & trucks, or will we find a way to help them?

...

Maggie wants a house with lots of light. I need one with character. & what we do have in common doesn`t help either
- we`re both
...

The setting is a comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience that has come expecting an evening of amusement instead sees a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. They could get up & leave, or boo & whistle & drive him from the stage, if they were not so drawn to glimpse his personal hell. Dovaleh G, a veteran st&-up comic
- charming, erratic, repellent
- exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful & gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.A Horse Walks into a Bar is a shocking & breathtaking read. Betrayals between lovers, the treachery of friends, guilt demanding redress. Flaying alive both himself & the people watching him, Dovaleh G provokes both revulsion & empathy from an audience that doesn`t know whether to laugh or cry
- & all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he`s been summoned to this performance.


...

`A work of great comic power qualified with firm & unsentimental compassion.`
- Anthony Burgess A House for Mr Biswas is V. S.
...

Born the `wrong way` & thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his forty-six years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, for which he is inadvertently responsible, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels & takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him & purchase a house of his own. Heartrending & darkly comic, A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century`s finest novels & this triumph of resilience, persistence & dignity masterfully evokes a man`s quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad. ...

A House in Corfu is the story of one of the most beautiful places on earth, still astonishingly unspoilt, on the west coast of Corfu. In the early 1960s, Emma Tennant`s parents, on a cruise, spotted a magical bay & decided to build a house there. This book is the story of that house, Rovinia, set in 42 hectares of land above the bay where legend has it Ulysses was shipwrecked & found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. It is also the story of the people who have been at Rovinia since the feast in the grove at the time of putting on the roof
- Maria, a miraculous cook & the presiding spirit of the house, & her husband Thodoros
- & of the inhabitants of the local village, high on the hill above the bay. Full of colour & contrast, A House in Corfu shows the huge changes in island life since the time of the building of the house, & celebrates, equally, the joy of belonging to a timeless world; the world of vine, olive & sea.

...