'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, Sunday Times . 'Is this how all orphans would speak - 'I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know' - if they had Dave Eggers' prodigious linguistic gifts. For he does write wonderfully, and this is an extremely impressive debut' - John Banville, Irish Times . '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, New York Times . 'Exhilarating ...Profoundly moving, occasionally angry and often hilarious ... A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, finally, a finite book of jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly' - New York Times Book Review . 'What is really shocking and exciting is the book's sheer rage. Ahwosg 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' - London Review of Books . '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' - Time . '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' - Washington Post .