The Every
The electrifying follow up to Sunday Times bestseller The Circle
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The electrifying follow-up to Dave Eggers' New York Times Bestseller The Circle
'Gulpable fictive entertainment . . . Eggers is a wonderful storyteller with an alert and defiant vision' Observer
When the world's largest search engine / social media company merges with the planet's dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous-and, oddly enough, most beloved-monopoly ever known: The Every.
Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company's weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilization of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?
Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company - and the human animal.
'More playful and satirical than Orwell . . . it scores as a series of brilliant set pieces and a devastating overall critique.' Sunday Times
'Part of the genius of this remarkable piece of satire, riven as it is with horribly plausible ideas and horribly good jokes. . . . What Eggers does so well is make The Every alluring as well as alarming...' The Times
'You read it and think: yes, this is set in the future but it is actually going on here and now. It is an urgent and necessary book. It's also fun. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar' The Scotsman
The Circle was a New York Times bestseller in 2013
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eggers's uneven follow-up to The Circle, which revolved around a futuristic social network, sparkles with provocative ideas but has trouble keeping itself together. The Every, a conglomerate provider of social media, internet search, and commerce, has subsumed the Circle, the utopian company featured in the previous book, and Delaney, an anti-monopoly-protagonist, seeks to destroy the Every from the inside. Eggers spends much of his time in "setup" mode, with a self-referential style that lands some nice jabs ("There had been a movie made about the Circle... and yet the movie, despite its pedigree, was considered unsuccessful and was seen by few"). More often, though, the work feels subsumed by anxiety over readers' attention spans ("No book should be over 500 pages, and if it is over 500, we found the absolute limit to anyone's tolerance is 577," says Delaney's team leader, Alessandro). And yet, these scenes of dialogue contain some of the best material, particularly when she plays her boss with made-up stories about how she's learned to trust aggregate critical judgments over her own taste, as part of her effort to fill him with bad ideas that would bring down the system. The climax involving Delaney's plot is, like Eggers's vision of the near future, plausible if predictable. This'll be a bit too wooly for many readers' tastes, but there's plenty of sharp apocalyptic satire.
