"I cannot recall the last time I was this moved by a novel. What Is the What is that rare book that truly deserves the overused and scarcely warranted moniker of 'sprawling epic.' Told with humor, humanity, and bottomless compassion for his subject, one Valentino Achak Deng, Eggers shows us the hardships, disillusions, and hopes of the long-suffering people of southern Sudan. This is the story of one boy's astonishing capacity to endure atrocity after atrocity, and yet refuse to abandon decency, kindness, and hope for home and acceptance. It is impossible to read this book and not be humbled, enlightened, transformed. I believe I will never forget Valentino Achak Deng."
"Eggers has done something remarkable with this book. He has managed to cross many barriers both real and artificial to tell the story of one man's tragedy and triumph in a way that emphasizes his simple humanity above the drama of his terrible situation. It is a book that shows there is no reason why geographical and cultural divides should prevent us from attempting to understand each other as citizens of this world."  
"Read this book, a true tale beautifully told by Dave Eggers, who works magic with words and does stunning justice to a story about the stunning injustice that rules Africa's largest country and the lives of its people. If you want to know more about Sudan, you'll find more depth and insight here than in any news report or policy paper. And if you want a good read, What Is the What will captivate, shock, entertain and move you as it connects the dots between our "normal" lives here in America and the inexplicable lives of the Lost Boys on the other side of the world."
“Hands down, Dave Eggers’s What Is the What stands as the single most thought-provoking, unusual and moving book [of the] year....It is beautifully written and explores all the deepest aspects of human life: grief, the existence of God, alienation, good and evil, love, friendship.”
“Direct and stirring.... The book—a sort of authorized autobiography— captures the clipped, anguished rhythms of a confessional....What Is the What is a stunning act of compassion.”
“Eggers’s generous spirit and seemingly inexhaustible energy... transform Valentino and the people he met on his journey into characters in a book with the imaginative sweep, the scope and, above all, the emotional power of an epic... Eggers has made the outlines of the tragedy in East Africa—so vague to so many Americans—no only sharp and clear but indelible. An eloquent testimony to the power of storytelling.”
“A novel in which every phrase falls with exquisite, revealing precision and the themes of the story play out as satisfyingly as in a large-scale symphony.... An extraordinary act of empathy and poetic imagination.... With its perfect blend of epic sweep and small, intimate moments, it stands worthily alongside the best work of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri.”
“An intimate epic that both describes, and is, a sweeping journey—a reading experience from which the remotely engaged book-lover emerges as a changed person.... In a stunning act of symbiotic literary ventriloquism, Eggers and Deng have evinced that nightmarish world of Sudanese civil war which so many endured and so few survived. It’s ultimately a work of deep psychological trauma and impossible, marvelous triumph.”
“Eggers is single-mindedly intent on conveying Deng’s voice, and capturing his life’s striking, sometimes contradictory themes....Eggers has created a novel full of horrible, beautiful, life-changing stuff....Read this book.”
“Deng’s voice—sometimes beautifully poetic, sometimes wryly funny and observant of American foibles and failures—is a voice to endure.... In this stunning novel, so empathetic, so wise, Dave Eggers has given us a boy’s pain, and it is as ancient as the world and as urgent as the morning.”
“Dave Eggers has given us a rare hybrid: a deeply political novel that complicates its moral vision but without surrendering... the audacity of hope.... A moving, deceptively simple tale of a real-life Sudanese refugee who wrestles with an unforgiving world.”
“Embroidered with everyday detail, the book captures the hardwired determination of life to prevail in the direst of circumstance. Amid the suffering and privation of the camps, there is also play, friendship and even pubescent romance. This, and Deng’s matter-of-fact resilience, staves off the bleakness. Hope is always strong. What Is the What erodes the membrane between First and Third worlds. There’s no safe, comforting distance here, no sense of Us and Them. In these pages there is only us. The heartbreaking, savage, screwed up, ignorant, complicit, beautiful us.”
“Wrenching and remarkable....Stunning. What Is the What is a portrait of a character that forces us to examine our world and ourselves.”
“The power of this new book is undeniable. Taking on the voice of Deng, Eggers has built a stubbornly humane history of the Sudanese tragedy, one that neither shies from nor exploits brutality....Eggers is as empathetic as authors come, and has a way of writing single sentences that feel like entire books.”
“As an emotional primer about the impacted recent history of the Sudan, about the fighting between north and south, government and rebels, Arabs and Dinka, murahaleen and SPLA, Eggers’s ventriloquism could hardly be bettered. He makes Achak’s an authentic and affecting voice of the grimmest narrative of our times.”
“Unsparing in the misery it depicts, but also richly embroidered with sharp detail and fully drawn characters....There is a love story, an invigorating dose of humor, and plenty of painfully intimate renderings of what war does to a human soul.”
“Gripping and important.”
“What Is the What is a novel that possesses the best qualities of a documentary film: the conviction of truthfulness, and the constant reminder of the arbitrariness of fate, for worse and for better. By setting his story of African annihilation and survival as a story of American immigration, Eggers ensures that it belongs to us all, as it must.”
“Eggers’s vivid and haunting story stays long in the mind as an account of what civil war does to children.”
“Though the migration theme may be as old as world literature itself, it doesn’t make What Is the What an old-fashioned epos. On the contrary: it is very up to date, a modern mixture of fiction and nonfiction that tells us the emotional truth behind a story. It’s both local and global, literary and humanitarian. Practical idealism in the shape of five hundred pages full of true caring for another’s fate. A man tells his story as if his life depends on it, because it does. The result is a novel with a voice you cannot ignore.”
“I have been interacting with the Lost Boys since the late 1980s, from the time they were first displaced in Sudan to their arrival in the United States. I thought I had heard and seen it all. But reading Valentino’s story has touched emotions in me I didn’t even know I had. Dave Eggers tells the story of Sudan through Valentino’s eyes, but he also elucidates the best and worst of our common humanity.”
“Dazzling and original....Eggers’s and Deng’s work stands as a historically important, occasionally comic and often heartrending look at a life most wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies.”
“Eggers has given Valentino such a convincing voice that you sympathize with him until the end. What Is the What compels you to listen to its message, because it’s a work . . . that instantly puts Eggers right up there with the masters of this genre: Norman Mailer and Truman Capote.”