What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel - Softcover

Eggers, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141015748 ISBN 13: 9780141015743

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 2008

Synopsis

What is the What

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Dave Eggers has done something remarkable with this book. He has managed to cross many barriers both real and artificial to tell the story of one man's tragedy and triumph in a way that emphasizes his simple humanity above the drama of his terrible situation. It is a book that shows there is no reason why geographical and cultural divides should prevent us from attempting to understand each other as citizens of this world."
--UZODINMA IWEALA, author of Beasts of No Nation

"I cannot recall the last time I was this moved by a novel. What is the What is that rare book that truly deserves the overused and scarcely warranted moniker of `sprawling epic.' Told with humor, humanity, and bottomless compassion for his subject, one Valentino Achak Deng, Eggers shows us the hardships, disillusions, and hopes of the long suffering people of southern Sudan. This is the story of one boy's astonishing capacity to endure atrocity after atrocity and yet refuse to abandon decency, kindness, and hope for home and acceptance. It is impossible to read this book and not be humbled, enlightened, transformed. I believe I will never forget Valentino Achak Deng."
--KHALED HOSSEINI, author of The Kite Runner

"What is the What is a novel that possesses the best qualities of a documentary film: the conviction of truthfulness, and the constant reminder of the arbitrariness of fate, for worse and for better. By setting his story of African annihilation and survival as a story of American immigration, Eggers ensures that it belongs to us all, as it must."
--PHILIP GOUREVITCH, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

"I have been interacting with the Lost Boys since the late 1980s, from the time they were first displaced in Sudan to their arrival in the United States. I thought I had heard and seen it all. But reading Valentino's story has touched emotions in me I didn't even know I had. Dave Eggers tells the story of Sudan through Valentino's eyes, but he also elucidates the best and worst of our common humanity."
--JOHN PRENDERGAST, International Crisis Group

About the Author:

Dave Eggers is the author of eleven books, including The Circle; Heroes of the Frontier; A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; and What is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France's Prix Medicis Etranger and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His non-fiction and journalism have appeared in the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Best American Travel Writing and the Best American Essays. Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, which publishes original fiction and non-fiction, and distributes the Voice of Witness series of books, which use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. He is the co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centres with locations around the country, and of ScholarMatch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his work has been translated into forty-two languages. He lives in Northern California with his family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited (UK)
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0141015748
• ISBN 13: 9780141015743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 538