Excerpt from The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When he woke, they were parked in the lot of the Santa Clara mosque. Sayed shook his shoulder. "Get up," he said. Prayers were beginning in a few minutes.

Mokhtar got out of the car, half-asleep. They grabbed the rooh afza out of the trunk and hustled into the mosque.

It was only after prayers that Mokhtar realized he'd left the satchel outside. On the ground, next to the car. He'd left the satchel, containing the three thousand dollars and his new eleven-hundred-dollar laptop, in the parking lot, at midnight.

He ran to the car. The satchel was gone. 

They searched the parking lot. Nothing.

No one in the mosque had seen anything. Mokhtar and Sayed searched all night. Mokhtar didn't sleep. Sayed went home in the morning. Mokhtar stayed in Santa Clara.

It made no sense to stay, but going home was impossible.

He called Jeremy. "I lost the satchel. I lost three thousand dollars and a laptop because of that damned pink milk. What do I tell people?"

Mokhtar couldn't tell the hundreds of people who had donated to Somali famine relief that their money was gone. He couldn't tell Miriam. He didn't want to think of what she'd paid for the satchel, what she would think of him—losing all that he had, all at once. He couldn't tell his parents. He couldn't tell Wallead that they'd be paying off eleven hundred dollars for a laptop Mokhtar would never use.

The second day after he lost the satchel, another friend of Mokhtar's, Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim, was flying to Egypt, to see what had become of the Arab Spring. Mokhtar caught a ride with him to the airport—it was halfway back to his parents' house. Ibrahim was finishing at UC Berkeley; he'd have his degree in months. He didn't know what to say to Mokhtar. Don't worry didn't seem sufficient. He disappeared in the security line and flew to Cairo.

Mokhtar settled into one of the black leather chairs in the atrium of the airport, and sat for hours. He watched the people go. The families leaving and coming home. The businesspeople with their portfolios and plans. In the International Terminal, a monument to movement, he sat, vibrating, going nowhere.

Excerpted from The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers. Copyright © 2018 by Dave Eggers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.