<p>‘Heartbreaking? Certainly. Staggering? Yes, I’d say so. And if genius is capturing the universal in a fresh and memorable way, call it that too’ Anthony Quinn, <i>Sunday Times</i><br><br> ‘Is this how all orphans would speak – “I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know” – if they had Dave Eggers’s prodigious linguistic gifts? For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut’ John Banville, <i>Irish Times</i><br><br> ‘A virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of a book that noisily announces the debut of a talented – yes, staggeringly talented – new writer’ – Michiko Kakutani, <i>New York Times </i><br><br> ‘Exhilarating . . . Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious . . . <i>A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</i> is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly’ – <i>New York Times Book Review</i><br><br> ‘What is really shocking and exciting is the book’s sheer rage. <i> AHWOSG</i> is truly ferocious, like any work of genius. Eggers – self-reliant, transcendent, expansive – is Emerson’s ideal Young American. [The book] does itself justice: it is a settling of accounts. And it is almost too good to be believed’ – <i>London Review of Books </i><br><br> ‘A hilarious book . . . In it, literary gamesmanship and self-consciousness are trained on life’s most unendurable experience, used to examine a memory too scorching to stare at, as one views an eclipse by projecting sunlight onto paper through a pinhole’ – <i> Time</i><br><br> ‘Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger . . . He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear . . . His book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries’ – <i>Washington Post</i></p>