Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is the winner of the American
Book Award and the LA Times Book Award. In August 2005,
as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New Orleans
has been abandoned by most citizens. But resident
Abdulrahman Zeitoun, though his wife and family had
gone, refused to leave. For days he traversed an
apocalyptic landscape of flooded streets by canoe. But
eventually he came to the attention of those 'guarding'
this drowned city. Only then did Zeitoun's nightmare
really begin. Zeitoun is the powerful, ultimately
uplifting true story of one man's courage when
confronted with an awesome force of nature followed by
more troubling human oppression. ''Eggers uses Zeitoun's
eyes to report on America's reasonless post-Katrina
world, Reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
documentaries, this is a true story told with the skills
of a master of fiction. Immensely readable''.
(Independent). ''Masterly. Brilliantly crafted,
powerfully written and deftly reported''. (Guardian).
''The stuff of great narrative non-fiction. Fifty years
from now, when people want to know what happened to this
once-great city, they will be talking about a family
named Zeitoun''. (The New York Times Book
Review).Award-winning author Dave Eggers is the editor
and founder of American literary journal McSweeney's and
the founder of 826 Valencia, a non-profit literacy
centre for disadvantaged young people in San Francisco.
He is the author of several novels, collections of short
stories and non-fiction works, including his first novel
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What is the
What (winner of the Prix Medici and finalist of the 2006
National Book Critics Circle Award), Zeitoun, The Wild
Things (a novel adapted from the illustrated book Where
the Wild Thing Are by Maurice Sendak), How We Are
Hungry, You Shall Know Our Velocity and, most recently,
A Hologram for the King. |
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