Dave Eggers's 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 Márquez'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.
