you shall know our velocity by dave eggers

His other best friend, Hand, joins the disbursement mission. (Half a dozen other authenticating illustrations appear in the novel, which helps to explain why it doesn't seem like a novel.) Now Will wants to get rid of his dosh, every cent of it, less from charity than for 'clarity', his vision of life having been blurred by the loss of one of his two best friends. The $80,000 burning a hole in his pocket has come from an ad agency, his reward for posing on a ladder screwing in lightbulbs and becoming a nationwide icon the picture is dutifully reproduced on page 42. The new book is more Don Quixote than Tristram Shandy, but Will, the narrator - young, artless and (it gradually emerges) death-haunted - feels familiar. JD Salinger met Laurence Sterne and, improbably, they became best friends. The risk Eggers ran was of sabotaging his own story - of dissipating the emotional authenticity of the content with the tricksiness of the form.

But the endless notes, acknowledgments, corrections, clarifications, apologies, addenda and 'rules and suggestions for enjoyment' (an extra 50 pages of them appended to the paperback edition) were also a hilarious critique of the confessional form - as well as a serious interrogation of the problems authors face when they write about 'real' people and events. At its heart lay the strange but true story of how the 21-year-old Eggers, having lost both his parents to cancer, became prime carer to his eight-year-old brother, Toph. Of course, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was much more than a memoir. The book is fiction, but the narrative voice is at times indistinguishable from Eggers's own, as heard in his wonderful non-fiction memoir of three years ago. Salinger, Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac rolled into one' The Times

But as their plans are frustrated, twisted and altered at every step and the natives prove far from grateful to their benefactors, Will and Hand find that the world is an infinitely bigger, more surreal and exhilarating place than they ever realised. Perhaps it's something to do with Jack's death - perhaps they'll find the reason later. They can't really say why they're doing it, just that it needs to be done. Taking a week out of their lives, they decide to travel around the world to give the money away. Will and Hand are burdened by $38,000 and the memory of their friend Jack. You Shall Know Our Velocity is a compelling and thought-provoking novel by award-winning Dave Eggers

You shall know our velocity by dave eggers