A Hologram for the King was published by McSweeney’s in 2012 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Alan Clay is fifty-four, divorced, in debt, and running out of options. His company, Reliant, has sent him to Saudi Arabia to demonstrate a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah at the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) — a massive development project being built in the desert outside Jeddah.
The problem is that KAEC is mostly empty. The presentation tent has no internet connection. The king’s visit is perpetually postponed. Alan and his young tech team wait in the desert heat, day after day, for something to happen. Meanwhile, Alan has a lump on his neck that may or may not be cancerous, his daughter is struggling through college, and he cannot stop calculating how his life went wrong — from the Schwinn bicycle company (whose manufacturing he helped move to China) to the present moment, a trajectory of American economic decline mapped onto one man’s body.
The novel is short, spare, and mordantly funny — Eggers strips away the verbal pyrotechnics of his earlier work and writes in clean, declarative sentences that mirror Alan’s depleted state. The Saudi setting is precisely observed: the empty highways, the unfinished construction, the Filipino and Bangladeshi workers who actually build the gleaming cities, the surreal gap between the development plans and the desert reality. Tom Hanks starred in the 2016 film adaptation, directed by Tom Tykwer.
Collecting A Hologram for the King
First edition (McSweeney’s, San Francisco, 2012): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80