'The company I work for is called Reliant.' That's not very good, is it?' He phoned down to reception for a cab. 'I've missed the bus out to KAEC and I am going to be late for the king.

It was nine o'clock when Alan eventually woke up. Luckily, he did not stop to wonder why an American IT giant would have employed a complete idiot to sell its most expensive hardware. An opportunity to make a six-figure commission selling an IT system to the King Abdullah Economic City in the desert. A native of Chicago, he lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.This was his last chance. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco.

Zeitoun was the winner of the American Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and What is the What was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and won France's Prix Medicis. The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate' Chicago Tribune'Completely engrossing' Fortune'Eggers can do fiction as well as he likes' Los Angeles TimesDave 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 and Zeitoun. modest and 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, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment - and a moving story of how we got here.Praise for A Hologram for the King:'Absorbing.

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.

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, and finally do something great.

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers