Description

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
A number one New York Times Bestseller

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college student who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut, at once hilarious and wildly inventive, reinvented the memoir for the twenty-first century.

‘Virtuosic’ – The New York Times
‘Prodigious’ – The Irish Times
‘Shocking’ – The London Review of Books
‘Moving’ – The Washington Post

Publisher Review

Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I’d say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too * The Sunday Times * Is this how all orphans would speak – “I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know” – if they had Dave Eggers’s prodigious linguistic gifts? For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut — John Banville * The Irish Times * What is really shocking and exciting is the book’s sheer rage. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers – self-reliant, transcendent, expansive – is Emerson’s ideal Young American. [The book] does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed * London Review of Books * A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented – yes, staggeringly talented – new writer — Michiko Kakutani * The New York Times * Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger . . . He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear . . . His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries * The Washington Post * Eggers is an original new voice, the real thing. When you read his extraordinary memoir you don’t laugh, then cry, then laugh again; you somehow experience these emotions all at once – and powerfully — David Remnick The force and energy of this book could power a train — David Sedaris