Though published and marketed as a novel, Eggers’s book was based on hundreds of hours of interviews and research. A few slight chronological tweaks of the actual events motivated the decision to identify the book as fiction, but it’s arguable whether it takes any more liberties than other classics of narrative nonfiction by Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. The story is essentially the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the so-called “lost boys” of the Sudan who trekked hundreds of miles across Africa in the company of other orphans, fending off lions and bandits, starvation and dehydration. Eggers also scrupulously and vividly recounts the fraught process of Deng’s adjustment to life in America.
