The Circle

Written by Dave Eggers

Narrated by Dion Graham

A bestselling dystopian novel that tackles surveillance, privacy and the frightening intrusions of technology in our lives—a “compulsively readable parable for the 21st century” (Vanity Fair). 

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. 

As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. 

Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. 

What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780804191173

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of seven books, including A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and What Is the What, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici. That book, about Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the civil war in Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which operates a secondary school in South Sudan run by Mr. Deng. Eggers is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco that produces a quarterly journal, a monthly magazine, The Believer:, a quarterly DVD of short films and documentaries, Wholphin; and an oral history series, Voice of Witness. In 2002, with Nínive Calegari he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for youth in the Mission District of San Francisco. Local communities have since opened sister 826 centers in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Eggers is also the founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. A native of Chicago, Eggers now lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.

Reviews for The Circle

[jsfecmd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent read about how technology can be abused in ways I had not thought of before reading this. Perhaps old hat now with the AI advances but concerning enough then. The way the top brass works the peons to bone rang true to me if a bit exaggerated.

[jackiecraven · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you've ever worked for an Internet company, you'll think this comical dystopian tale isn't so funny, or so bizarre. The Circle is a masterpiece of satire.

[fmclellan-29530 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I don't know what to say about this book. It is a chilling portrayal of a dystopian NOW, where Google/Facebook/your favorite social media company here, takes over. In a big way. Which leads to a tiresome not-really-a-parody that is still TOO MUCH altogether. Sort of glad I read it; wouldn't have wanted to give it much more time.

[kwskultety · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A bloviated version of 1984, with social media as the fulcrum. Thought provoking; with a twist at the end I didn't see coming.

[steve02476 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not so great. I did manage to finish it, though. Story seemed clumsy, characters uninteresting. A lot of poking of straw men representing the worst of Google, FaceBook, etc.

[martialalex92 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

What could have been a moderate critique of some extreme tech positions, crammed between paper-thin characters and metaphors that are about as subtle as a crack on the head

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Have you ever wondered what society would be like if a social media conglomerate took over the dissemination and storage of all personal information, including purchasing habits, voting records, and medical history? A society in which cameras are everywhere recording almost everything? Where personal privacy is yielded in the name of transparency and the greater good? The Circle explores these questions via a science fiction dystopian tale reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, except “Big Brother” has been updated to include the internet.

The protagonist, Mae, is a naïve twenty-four-year-old with low self-esteem who has gotten her dream job at The Circle, a conglomerate that has acquired all the prominent technology companies. She rises through the ranks to become the company’s online spokesperson, wearing a high resolution camera that streams audio and video of her every move to anyone who cares to tune in. She enjoys the limelight and the attention. I enjoyed the satire on the corporate environment, where every single transaction is measured and reported in real time, and employees are “encouraged” (aka required) to take part in the online community.

It is a fast-paced story written in a straight-forward manner. It examines such themes as the boundaries of information sharing, personal privacy, democracy, monopolies, and the abuse of power. The characters are rather thinly drawn, as the plot is the primary focus. Overall, I found it interesting and thought-provoking. For me, the main drawback was Mae’s lack of critical thinking skills, which, from my experience in technology, is rare. Recommended to fans of science fiction with a dystopian component.

[decaturmamaof2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Shudder. This book made me feel physically ill, for some reason. Could not bear to keep going - I think mostly because of the stressful scenes of social media overload!

[AlejandraSabogal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"The Whole" is the continuation of the successful novel "The Circle," where a satire against the excesses of large technology companies is captured; in an attempt to collect information from users of their applications, they undermine their privacy and even infringe upon their rights, to the point that those who resist adopting these technologies are isolated from society and labeled. The dominance of The Whole is such that there is no political or economic opponent that can stand against it, leading society to surrender and ultimately cede control over their decisions and freedoms.

The level of detail given to each of the applications proposed in the novel is so overwhelming that it seems that someone just needs to develop it in real life for readers to feel that the author is accurately describing our social and technological reality.

The Whole is quite an extensive novel (526 pages) that at times feels exhausting to read. In my opinion, it goes against the literary recommendations stated within it; a book should not have more than 400 pages and should not have more than three central ideas, and this work far exceeds its own recommendations. (Translated from Spanish)

[mantra_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A chillingly prophetic novel!

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Circle by Dave Eggers is a dense novel of ideas, it warns how we are exposing our inner selves to public scrutiny by allowing the internet access to all aspects of our lives. We are trading our privacy and individuality in favor of mob rule with membership to media sites like Facebook and Tic Tok. We walk around with our cell phones turned into to various sites all the while seemingly oblivious to the fact that everything we do and say has become public property.

The story has us following Mae Holland as she is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company. The Circle is operated out of a large California campus, linking the users’ personal email, social media, banking and purchasing with their operating system resulting in ease of operation but offset by the transparency it creates. As Mae learns more and more about the Circle, her ambition accelerates and she embraces the ideas that are being developed. It is left to the reader to decide whether Mae has sold her soul as questions about privacy, democracy and the limits of exposure are raised.

The Circle was an interesting, although slow read. I give it high marks for concept, but the story never really engaged me. The perils of the internet are well documented and I expect this book would resonate with people at many different levels depending on one’s opinion on how much data manipulation and on-line exposure they will accept.

[marklacy-355086 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The notion of a singularity, as popularized by Ray Kurzweil, refers to an accelerating process of technologies building upon one another until we reach a point where we cannot humanly understand or control the outcome. This usually refers to an "explosion" of intelligence, facilitated by computers, that greatly surpasses what humans possess.

Dave Eggers' novel The Circle depicts a world, uncomfortably similar to our own, which rapidly, and with good intentions, is headed toward a singularity of knowledge that precludes, and even outlaws, privacy. This is a world where the tools for gathering and manipulating information become increasingly powerful, causing an "explosion" of control that threatens to eradicate the concept of the "individual."

The main character in this story, a young woman named Mae, is a new employee of a Silicon Valley company known as the Circle. The Circle is a company with a global reach whose pioneering vision is to improve society through the gleaning and analysis of information so everyone can make better decisions on anything from a personal level to an international level. Anyone who has visited some of the large companies in Silicon Valley will easily recognize in the Circle the excitement and energy that flows through a campus of idealistic young people working on the edge of technology in a lucrative industry, where the barriers between personal and professional life blur and disappear as all sorts of perks help feed the employees the emotional energy they need to pour into their work.

Mae had hardly begun her first day at work in the Circle when I realized where her future was headed. Employee indoctrination in the Circle mirrors that of a cult. Like any cult, you enter the cult by being sponsored. You are presented with grand visions of the future, rewarded for working to bring about that future, and threatened with ostracism or excommunication for failing to adhere to and promote the purpose of the cult. You are shepherded into the cult, gain recognition within the cult, and come to adopt the cult's values as your own. In the Circle, the personal need for privacy becomes subsumed by the greater good of sharing. "Sharing is Caring" and "Privacy is Theft" are recurring mantras.

Mae's weakness -- the tragic flaw of many who wind up in cults -- is a need for validation. Eggers suggests that the need for validation is the weakness of many who worship the consumption of information and social media. In the end we face the danger -- symbolized in The Circle by a shark -- of being consumed by both the information and social media we thought to consume. The Circle comes as a fable, a warning that the power that comes with tools for gleaning and analyzing information on a massive scale puts us on a slippery slope which -- if we're not careful -- could carry us, even with all the right motives, into a totalitarian future where an individual's needs are deemed insignificant compared to the needs of society.

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So scarily close to being possible.

[belana-990668 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Let's start with the narration: I thought it was very good. It's always a little odd to have a male narrator doing the whole book from a female perspective, but it worked out just fine.

On to the book: I like the subject, and the idea of how things might develop if there's enough money and influence behind a scheme. We all know, that given the right circumstances, you can erect a totalitarian state within just a few years. We are aware that big companies like google, amazon, or facebook (to name but a few) know a lot more about us than is healthy, and the latest data breach at facebook proves that not only those we trust our data with can access it.
But despite all this, I had trouble believing the story being possible, and I had a really hard time to understand Mae at all. Sure, at first it was all believable, but then it quickly turned to: Just what does she think she is doing?
I'm still not sure how I( feel about the ending. I guess it is only consistent, and it certainly isn't what I expected.
I'm not sure I would have stuck with the book had I read it, but the narration was compelling, AND I wanted to know how it all turned out, so I listened to the end.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A dystopian satire (although at times it feels barely satirical) about social media and tech companies, featuring a corporation called The Circle, which is sort of like Google, Facebook, and Twitter all rolled into one and then made even more cult-like. The folks at The Circle not only fail to value privacy and cheerfully subordinate it to the desires of capitalism, they actually regard it as something akin to a moral evil. And they see it as their mission to make the world a better place.

It's a good premise, very Black Mirror-ish, and I appreciate the way Eggers carefully avoids straw-manning his targets (even to the extent of being willing to stipulate to some of the positive effects of the Circle's approach that I really don't personally find particularly creditable). But I'm afraid I never liked it anywhere near as much as I wanted to. The whole thing just feels entirely too heavy-handed. Certainly we did not need 400 pages to get the point, and I can't help thinking that it would have been far, far more effective if cut down to the length of a novella.

[brendart20 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book stayed with me years after reading it. It's terrifying and believable. In fact, I think it's already being done in more subtle ways.

[Cristinapsf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's more entertaining than the other two. Reading the complete trilogy has been quite tedious for me. (Translated from Spanish)

[Juan José Leal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's a good book, it's engaging, it has some parts that I honestly believe don't contribute anything to the plot, but they're there mainly to fill a space for a certain type of person. However, due to its essence and message, it's impossible not to relate it to 1984. I feel that the ending could have been better executed, as it left several unanswered questions. (Translated from Spanish)

[jamestomasino · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had to stop reading at 39%. I'm viscerally reacting to it and the gross privacy issues it raises. It's more stressful than a horror suspense and I can't deal. Absolutely nothing has happened in the book so far. The world building of the Circle and what it represents is horrific. Nope. Can't do another page.

[ISIDRO RUIZ · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 9. Third work in the Conspiracy trilogy, following The Room 77 and the Cohen Case. After the events in Paris and London, the three professors move to Manhattan to try to save the life of the President of the United States and 117 other world leaders who are trapped inside the United Nations building and threatened by a deadly virus... (Translated from Spanish)

[arosoff-513117 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Dave Eggers had an Idea.

He looked at Facebook and Google and Twitter and Instagram and PayPal, and imagined, what if it were all one service? How far could it go, in our era of surveillance and Big Data?

Why, it could be like 1984!

And lo, he was pleased with this idea.

He was so pleased with this idea, and the world he built around it, that even though he wrote a novel around it, he dispensed with much of the actual novel-writing part of it: those pesky little things involving character development, plot, and suspension of disbelief. The plot functions to propel the idea. The characters behave in service to the plot. Whether or not the arc is believable in the context of human nature and behavior is irrelevant. Whether or not people would simply roll over and accept the abolition of privacy is simply not asked. We've accepted it being chipped away, so we will simply lie down and allow the steamroller to continue. The mob shall rule. In Eggersworld, people accept TruYou and suddenly, civility erupts in newspaper comments, and that's before Mae even steps on the scene. If you buy this, you'll buy The Circle.

In short: Screw you, Dave.

[teuthex-149975 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is terrifying.

[tonifgmamtc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars

Scary book because it seems so close to potential reality. It's social media taking over tracking everyone and turning us into a totalitarian government. There's no privacy, and everyone must participate. After reading this book, I'm more in favor of unplugging frequently. I felt like going somewhere without technology for a few hours to decompress, with all the notifications the characters were getting, I couldn't handle seeing any for awhile. It also made me realize how worrying about likes and smiles and seeing everything on a feed can take your time.

[authentico · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This perfectly describes what the world is coming too if we aren't careful (The Circle either being Google or Facebook).

The book does talk detailed about the main character but doesn't go into much detail outside of the circle.

I suggest you watch the movie (of the same name) at some point after reading the book.

[amerynth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Dave Eggers' novel "The Circle" has all the potential in the world to be a great novel, but the execution of the idea is lacking.

I really liked the premise of the novel, which is about intrusive technology and its potential for promoting good and evil. Or at least, that's what the novel should be about. Eggers doesn't do a good job of balance here -- he completely ignores some aspects, such as negative comments that generally fill peoples' feeds and has a protagonist who is fairly unwilling to question anything.

The main characters who are opposed to technology's march are weirdos who create antler lamps and dwell in the shadows.

Overall, I found the novel had an interesting premise, but it wasn't well executed.

[ladyars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The scariest thing about reading this book was not being scared by some of the ideas presented by Circle employees.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eggers takes on the world of social media and exposes the monstrosities of knowing everything about everyone. Frightening, because it's completely conceivable.

[marquis784-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Many comments regarding this book.
It's a book I liked and hated at the same time. Although the writing simplistic and the concept not unique, the overwhelming idea of utopian societies is fascinating.
I have to admit that I became consumed with the novel and how it would end. I think that is what fascinates me most about utopian/dystopian novels....the concepts of good versus bad, right versus wrong, etc. the grey areas where people live and get lost....intermingled with those concrete single focused people. The leaders versus the followers. The same cautionary tale told from a different point of view. Don't we all know how these stories end? Should we?

[Karenbell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked the book; I think some scenes are unnecessary, which makes the reading feel a bit dull for me personally. As for the characters, they are very "basic." The only one worth mentioning is Mae, the main character of this story, but she has her own issues as well. I don't know how to describe her development without giving spoilers. I liked the ending; throughout the story, you start to realize how it will end, but it has been given a nice touch. (Translated from Spanish)

[sami7-951065 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very nice ideas of the kind of dystopia we are heading for. Partly ruined by the female heroine.