Hamish Hamilton bags 'lacerating' Eggers follow-up to The Circle

Hamish Hamilton has signed The Every, a "hilarious and horrifying" follow-up to The Circle by Dave Eggers.

Simon Prosser, publishing director at the Penguin imprint, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Andrew Wylie. The novel will also be published in the US by Knopf and McSweeney’s, and released in hardback on 21st October.

The Every imagines where submission to an all-digital culture will take humanity, and what happens when one woman resists.

The synopsis explains: "When the world’s largest search engine and social media company merges with the planet’s dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: the Every.

"Delaney Wells is an unlikely new hire. A former forest ranger and unwavering tech skeptic, she charms her way into an entry-level job with one goal in mind: to take down the company from within. With her compatriot, the not-at-all-ambitious Wes Kavakian, they look for the company’s weaknesses, hoping to free humanity from all-encompassing surveillance and the emoji-driven infantilisation of the species. But does anyone want what Delaney is fighting to save? Does humanity truly want to be free?

"Studded with unforgettable characters and lacerating set-pieces, The Every blends satire and terror, while keeping the reader in breathless suspense about the fate of the company — and the human animal."

Eggers' other books include The Monk of Mokha, The Captain and the Glory, and The Parade. He is founder of McSweeney’s, the San Francisco independent publishing company and has sold just under 362,000 copies for almost £3m, through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market. He is co-founder of 826 National, a network of youth writing centers and Voice of Witness, which advances human rights through oral history publishing and education. Eggers is a winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.