You Shall Know Our Velocity - Softcover

Dave Eggers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141013451 ISBN 13: 9780141013459

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 2008

Synopsis

Will and Hand are burdened by $38,000 and the memory of their friend Jack. Taking a week out of their lives, they decide to travel around the world to give the money away. They can't really say why they're doing it, just that it needs to be done. Perhaps it's something to do with Jack's death - perhaps they'll find the reason later. But as their plans are frustrated, twisted and altered at every step and the natives prove far from grateful to their benefactors, Will and Hand find that the world is an infinitely bigger, more surreal and exhilarating place than they ever realised. In fact, it's somewhere to get lost in!

About this title

From the Back Cover

“Headlong, heartsick and footsore....Frisbee sentences that sail, spin, hover, circle and come back to the reader like gifts of gravity and grace....Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.” -- The New York Times Book Review

"You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." -- LA Weekly

"There's an echolet of James Joyce there and something of Saul Bellow's Chinatown bounce, but we're carried into the narrative by a fluidity of line that is Eggers's own." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Eggers is a wonderful writer, bold and inventive, with the technique of a magic realist." -- Salon

"An entertaining and profoundly original tale." -- San Francisco Chronicle

“Eggers ’s writing really takes off -- his forte is the messy, funny tirade, stuffed with convincing pain and wry observations.” -- Newsday

“Often rousing ...achieves a kind of anguished, profane poetry.” -- Newsweek

“The bottom line that matters is this: Eggers has written a terrific novel, an entertaining and imaginative tale.” -- The Boston Globe

“There are some wonderful set-pieces here, and memorable phrases tossed on the ground like unwanted pennies from the guy who runs the mint.” -- The Washington Post Book World

“Powerful.... Eggers’s strengths as a writer are real: his funny pitch-perfect dialog; the way his prose delicately captures the bumblebee blundering of Will’s thoughts; ... and the stream-water clarity of his descriptions.... There is genius here.... Who is doing more, single-handedly and single-mindedly, for American writing?” -- Time

From the Inside Flap

In his first novel, Dave Eggers has written a moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. It reminds us once again what an important, necessary talent Dave Eggers is.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141013451
• ISBN 13: 9780141013459
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368