The lauded, bestselling memoir of Dave Eggers's extraordinary life with his younger brother Now part of the Picador Collection

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
A number one New York Times Bestseller

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college student who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut, at once hilarious and wildly inventive, reinvented the memoir for the twenty-first century.

'Brilliant' – The Guardian
‘Virtuosic’ – The New York Times
‘Prodigious’ – The Irish Times
‘Shocking’ – The London Review of Books
‘Moving’ – The Washington Post

"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" - The Sunday Times

"Brilliant . . . I would take this powerful, energised, living, breathing and imperfect adventure over a tired old travelogue any day" - The Guardian

"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" - The Irish Times

"What is really shocking and exciting is the book's sheer rage. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius 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 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" - The New York Times

"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" - The Washington Post