Holograms and cyberstalkers

By Maggie Fergusson

FICTIONA Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton, hardback, out now). America is no longer a land of dreams but one of recession-fed dysfunction. This is the thesis behind Dave Eggers’s tragicomedy, and he explores it through 54-year-old Alan Clay, a middle-management Everyman past his professional sell-by date. In the baffling heat of Saudi Arabia, waiting to pitch a holographic teleconferencing system to King Abdullah—a 21st-century Godot who never materialises—Clay revisits his past in a series of flashbacks, racked by loneliness and large, unanswered questions. Despised by both his wife and his junior colleagues, he swings between extreme hypo-chondria and a longing for the curtains to come down on his life. Eggers’s prose is brisk and spare, and his sensitivity to human frailty unnerving. One moment you’re laughing at Clay’s neuroses, the next they feel horribly familiar.

SHORT STORYSilently and Very Fast by Candia McWilliam (Amazon, e-book, out now). Kindle Singles, recently launched in Britain, are a stroke of genius—as long as you have a Kindle. To the writer, they give a royalty of 70% rather than the usual single figures. To the reader, for less than the price of an espresso, they deliver an invigorating shot—fiction or non-fiction, anything from 5,000 to 30,000 words—to carry you through a train journey, and keep your thoughts humming well beyond it. This one weaves an Edinburgh "Under Milk Wood" into the Greek legend of the Graiae, the three sisters who share one all-seeing eye. Opening on a freezing winter’s morning, it moves from a beauty salon to a betting shop, from a window cleaner to a lap dancer, all observed with a precise compassion. Like the snow that begins to fall at noon, everything in the story has both a bright and a murderous aspect. When, at dusk, the sisters gather in the wool shop, things turn very dark indeed.