The Parade

Description

From the best-selling author of The Circle, a powerful modern fable on the legacy of colonialism, the dark power of global corporations, and the challenge of truly 'doing good' Two Western men are sent to work far away from home, tasked with paving a road the length of a country. The country is dangerous and largely lawless, only just recovering from a devastating civil war, and the road will unite north and south. The road is Progress. The road is Hope. And, when it is completed, a great parade will march it end to end. The two men follow a route from the outer villages to the capital, operating their high-tech road-building machine and bickering along the way. One man is highly experienced, reliable, focused, pausing only to sleep and eat the company-issued food. The other is chaotic, curious, forever joking with locals and breaking protocol. But when illness, corruption, and theft compromise their mission, the pair discover danger far greater than anything they had anticipated.

Dave Eggers is the author of twelve books, including The Monk of Mokha; 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. He is the founder of McSweeney's and the cofounder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired similar programs around the world, and of ScholarMatch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and is the cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that illuminates human rights crises through oral history. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letter. His work has been translated into forty- two languages. www.Internationalcongressofyouthvoices.org www.826valencia.org www.scholarmatch.org www.voiceofwitness.org www.valentinoachakdeng.org www.mcsweeneys.net www.daveeggers.net

Tightly written, carefully designed to wrong-foot preconceptions, and astute... An intensely gripping story * Evening Standard * Certainly his best book since What is the What, The Parade may well be the sound of a major writer finding his mature voice * Spectator * A parable of progress, as told by J.M. Coetzee to Philip K. Dick -- Richard Flanagan The Parade is a heartbreaker and a mindbender. It is a novel of ideas that packs an emotional punch that left me reeling. With clear, unadorned prose, Eggers lays bare the costs of war, and of peace -- Tayari Jones A readable, atmospheric book * The Times * This is a tale for our time, an allegory about intervening in foreign lands without knowledge, and so a nightmare vision of our endless wars. -- Thomas E. Ricks In The Parade, the anxiety grows with every page and every mile to reach an ending that turns everything upside down and sends us into the heart of darkness. A minimalistic, merciless novel. A powerful allegory and a painfully concrete contemporary story-Eggers is a true virtuoso of that synthesis. -- Georgi Gospodinov Wide-ranging and thoughtful engagement with concepts of power and inequality and whether Western notions of what constitutes 'progress' are always right * Literary Review * It partakes of a complex of anxieties about America's role as an affluent superpower of dubious virtue * Financial Times * Egger's commitment to social and political issues continues * Mail on Sunday *