Book review: A Hologram for the King, By Dave Eggers

Eggers's all-American anti-hero finds himself stranded in a ghost city in the Saudi Arabian desert, waiting for a Godot-like king to arrive, and mulling over not just his own disappointing fall from grace in life, but also American's economic decline.

The greatest accomplishment of this story is in its telling: the prose is not cluttered with Eggers's sometimes tricksy literary non-linearity. Written with a simple, spare stylishness, it is at once a masterly critque of globalisation gone wrote and an existential cry from the soul.