To them, Clay is “more burden than boon, more harm than good, irrelevant, superfluous to the forward progress of the world.” Although he has occasional blasts of a salesman’s bravado and optimism, he generally believes they are right.

Rather than being welcomed into a completed office building, he is relegated to a tent, where his much-younger staffers idle away in the heat. He waits for King Abdullah to come every day, he travels to the remote, unbuilt, ambitious metropolis envisioned by the king, the KAEC. This is a classic action setup, but the action here is subtle: Clay waits. He’s got an opportunity, a one-last-chance kind, to close a major IT deal in Saudi Arabia if he can pull it off, his commission will be enough to keep body and soul together, or at least get him back in the black. His vices are mild, and he’s not degenerate, but he is close to desperate. He is divorced, indebted, trying to sell his home so he can pay for his daughter’s second year of college. In the wake of the 2008 recession, Clay is a former upper middle class salesman whose job evaporated and whose income as a consultant has dwindled to an unsustainable pittance. There is no wronged man in the fictional departure A Hologram for the King - instead our protagonist is Alan Clay, a 54-year-old American whose circumstances are because of his own choices, or bad luck, or a destiny he failed to see coming. The nonfiction Zeitoun (2009) is about a Syrian American who, despite valiant actions after Hurricane Katrina, wound up locked in isolation What Is the What (2006) novelizes the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a “lost boy” of Sudan. Lately, when he’s not writing screenplays, Eggers has written bestselling books with a strong sense of social justice that are true or based in truth. Yet inside all of that is Eggers the writer, who’s publishing his first novel of pure invention in a decade, A Hologram for the King.

For his work, he’s been awarded the TED Prize, the Heinz Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Innovators Award. He’s the head of the multi-city literacy nonprofit 826, which is partly supported by whimsical storefronts like the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store. The 42-year-old author is accomplished in many fields - he’s the founder of McSweeney’s, a successful independent publishing house and innovative literary journal that grew out of a still-vital humor website. More than any other writer of his generation, Dave Eggers is a brand.

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers