What Is the What cover art

What Is the What

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

What Is the What

By: Dave Eggers
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £24.99

Buy Now for £24.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Valentino Achak Deng is just a boy when conflict separates him from his family and forces him to leave his small Sudanese village, joining thousands of other orphans on their long, long walk to Ethiopia, where they find safety for a time.

Along the way Valentino encounters enemy soldiers, liberation rebels and deadly militias, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation. But there are experiences ahead that will test his spirit in even greater ways than these....

©2006 Dave Eggers (P)2007 BBC Audiobooks America Biographical Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Biography Africa Middle East

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Radiance of Tomorrow cover art
The Bite of the Mango cover art
Zeitoun cover art
The Diplomat's Daughter cover art
The Hour of Sunlight cover art
People of Heaven cover art
Beware of Pity cover art
Captive cover art
The Kite Runner cover art
A Thousand Splendid Suns cover art
Remember Us cover art
The Power of One cover art
Salt to the Sea cover art
Beneath a Scarlet Sky cover art
This Tender Land cover art
The Lost Boys cover art

Critic reviews

"Read Dave Eggers. What Is the What - it's the best book of the year." ( Guardian)
"A remarkable book: harrowing, witty, wretched, delightful; and always compelling, always surprising." ( London Review of Books)
All stars
Most relevant  
This story is aching to be listened to. Somewhat apocryphal in places, it still gives a hardnosed look at the hope through a hard life as told through the eyes of a Sudanese refugee.

It is the first book that brought me to tears and made me laugh too.

Heartbreaking and Hopeful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
an important book from the versatile mr eggers. takes you to a world we saw on tv, and still do to this day

stunning

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A really intriguing story about the struggles of the lost boys in South Sudan. However, I find the story unsatisfactory told with many loose ends. Often too much time was spent on detail which added little to the story and at the same time some of the most harrowing points of the story felt rushed through an in authentic in their telling.

Important story, clumsily told

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.