A riveting account of Hurricane Katrina and a shocking tale of wrongful arrest and racism, Zeitoun is the true story of one Syrian-American, plucked from his home and accused of terrorism, written by one of America's most high-profile literary writers, now available for the first time in paperback from Vintage Canada.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy — an American who converted to Islam — and their children, and the surreal atmosphere in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research — in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Zeitoun was in disbelief. It had been a dizzying series of events — arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage. It surpassed the most surreal accounts he’d heard of third-world law enforcement.

Inside the cage, Todd ranted and swore. He couldn’t believe it. But then again, he noted, it was not unprecedented. During Mardi Gras, when the local jails were full, the New Orleans police often housed drunks and thieves in temporary jails set up in tents.

This one, though, was far more elaborate, and had been built since the storm. Looking at it, Zeitoun realized that it was not one long cage, but a series of smaller, divided cages. He had seen similar structures before, on the properties of his clients who kept dogs. This cage, like those, was a single-fenced enclosure divided into smaller ones. He counted sixteen. It looked like a giant kennel, and yet it looked even more familiar than that.

It looked precisely like the pictures he’d seen of Guantánamo Bay. Like that complex, it was a vast grid of chain-link fencing with few walls, so the prisoners were visible to the guards and each other. Like Guantánamo, it was outdoors, and there appeared to be nowhere to sit or sleep. There were simply cages and the pavement beneath them.


The space inside Zeitoun and Todd’s cage was approximately fifteen by fifteen feet, and was empty but for a portable toilet without a door. The only other object in the cage was a steel bar in the shape of an upsidedown U, cemented into the pavement like a bike rack. It normally served as a guide for the buses parking in the lot and for passengers forming lines. It was about thirty inches high, forty inches long.

Across from Zeitoun’s cage was a two-story building, some kind of Amtrak office structure. It was now occupied by soldiers. Two soldiers stood on the roof, holding M-16s and staring down at Zeitoun and Todd.

Todd raged, wild-eyed and protesting. But the guards could hear little of what he said. Even Zeitoun, standing near him, could hear only muffled fragments. It was then that Zeitoun realized that there was a sound, a heavy mechanical drone, cloaking the air around them. It was so steady and unchanging that he had failed to notice it.


Zeitoun turned around and realized the source of the noise. The back of their cage nearly abutted the train tracks, and on the tracks directly behind them stood an Amtrak train engine. The engine was operating at full power on diesel fuel, and, Zeitoun realized in an instant, was generating all the electricity used for the station and the makeshift jail. He looked up at the monstrous grey machine, easily a hundred tons, adorned with a small red, white, and blue logo, and knew that it would be with them, loud and unceasing, as long as they were held there.

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FINALIST – The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest

"Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. . . . Eggers's tone is pitch-perfect."
— The New York Times Book Review

"Zeitoun is impeccably structured and bursting with empathy, but Eggers's real success is in how thoroughly he camouflages his own authorial voice. He writes in poignant, straight-ahead prose that never clutters or dresses up the subject matter. The resulting book is so evocative and user-friendly that it will appeal to readers of virtually all ages."
— The Georgia Straight

"A heartfelt book, so fierce in its fury, so beautiful in its richly nuanced, compassionate telling of an American tragedy, and finally, so sweetly, stubbornly hopeful."
— The Times-Picayune
 
“Gripping and moving.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
 
“I deeply admired the talent, ambition and courage it must have taken to write Zeitoun. . . . His writing is spare and precise, with respect for both the reader and the story, and underlying the narrative [is] a wonderful sense of outrage made all the more powerful because of how light his touch is.”
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of The Thing Around Your Neck
 
“Eggers . . . sensibly resists rhetorical grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves. His skill is most evident in how closely he involves the reader in Zeitoun’s thoughts.”
— The New Yorker
 
“The book serves as a damning indictment of governmental and judicial failings in the wake of Katrina—but beyond that, it recounts a wrenching, human story of family, faith and, ultimately, hope. Dave Eggers is an important writer with a big heart, as conscientious as he is prolific. Whatever he does next, and however he does it, his work matters, and people should be listening.”
— The Globe and Mail
 
“Brings the city in its immediate post-storm aftermath vividly to life. . . . No matter how much you’ve read and heard about what went on in New Orleans in the days and weeks following Katrina, much of what happens to Zeitoun will probably be new and shocking to you. . . . This book is a modern-day American epic that brings the complexity and ennobling dimensions of the best fiction to a real-life story that needed to be told.”
— The Gazette


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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DAVE EGGERS is the author of seven books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, What Is the What and The Wild Things as well as co-writer of the film Away We Go, starring Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. He is the editor of McSweeney's, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is cofounder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people. His interest in oral history led to his 2004 cofounding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire and The Believer.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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