Breaking into a new world
AMERICAN author Dave Eggers is well-known for setting his bestselling books around the globe – everywhere from his home in the Bay Area of San Francisco and Costa Rica to northern and eastern Africa and Saudi Arabia.
Now, he’s chosen yet another new setting: where primary school students live. Yes, Dave Eggers’ next literary adventure will be for a younger crowd.
The fantasy novel The Lifters, is the first of a two-book deal with publishers Alfred A. Knopf.
The Lifters is scheduled for March 27, 2018, the publisher says. Featuring illustrations by brothers Eric and Terry Fan, the book tells of a troubled boy named Granite and a girl named Catalina who through a magic door handle introduces the boy to a strange new world.
“The Lifters has been on my mind for almost 10 years,” Eggers said in a statement.
“That’s when I had the idea that a simple cupboard handle could open a hillside to a warren of kid-sized tunnels under a town – and that it would be up to these kids to keep everyone living aboveground upright and safe.
“My goal was to write the book I would have wanted to read when I was a middle-grader, with enough adventure and jokes and mystery to keep even an antsy reader engaged.”
Eggers’ first book, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (2000), is a part autobiographical, part fictional chronicle of his stewardship of younger brother Christopher, or “Toph”, following the cancer-related deaths of his parents. Eggers was 21 at the time, his brother, eight.
The book came out to great critical and commercial success, reaching No.1 on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Time magazine dubbed it “The Best Book of the Year” while the London Times chose it as the 12th best book of the decade. – AP