The Circle cover art

The Circle

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

The Circle

By: Dave Eggers
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £14.03

Buy Now for £14.03

When Mae 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. Mae can't believe her great fortune to work for them - 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...
‘Tremendous. Inventive, big hearted and very funny. Prepare to be addicted' DAILY MAIL©2013 Dave Eggers (P)2013 Random House Audio Suspense Thriller & Suspense Scary
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
Clunky, in the sense that 1984 and Atlas Shrugged are clunky, this is a plodding novel tackling sociology and economics in the digital age. I read it in this spirit - as a discussion of the dilemmas we face with big data and social networks: the advantages of transparency Vs privacy and identifiability Vs anonymity, forcing social responsibility and conformity against the individual's 'right' to stay apart, unmonitored and anti-social. To my mind I ended up more in favour of transparency and forced identification; Eggers seems to land few punches in favour of anonymity, despite trying to warn of some dystopian, digital future.

Clunky means the characters are made of cardboard and there is virtually no plot. People behave in unlikely ways and believe unlikely things (in my experience, people are much less easy to lead by the nose than Eggers thinks). Eggers also makes the classic errors of a man narrating as a woman: his heroine, May, enjoys, and is keen to repeat, perfunctory (but hugely satisfying) sex in a toilet with a strange man who has failed to give her his name (and turns out to be... oh, I shouldn't spoil things, should I? ). The only clothes described are when May is 'wearing a red silk blouse and black skirt'. Dave, either do some research into how women think or narrate as a man.

Narration. Professional, appropriately Californian.

A very clunky novel

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was hooked from the beginning
Worryingly prophetic, I hoped all the way through for a different ending but the ending as written, proved to be the right one. This book made a me want to discard all of my technology!! Brilliantly brought alive by the narrator.

Gripping

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator talks to fast but the book is really interesting and overall quite good.

Quite good

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Food for thought what the lack of self esteem can result in.
Very Scary consequences.

Big Brother gone wild.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book gets scarier the more you listen. V thought provoking and if really listened to v scary

Makes you think

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews