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The Every is a 2021 dystopian novel written by American author Dave Eggers. The novel is a sequel to Eggers's 2013 novel The Circle. It tells the story of a woman named Delaney Wells who joins The Every, a company formed by a merger between The Circle and an e-commerce giant known as "the jungle" (a thinly-disguised version of Amazon). Wells feels the company is too powerful, and she joins with the intent of destroying it from the inside.
Delaney is hired, and the company sets about productizing the idea she presented during her interview. This also results in Wes Makazian being hired as a developer at The Every. As part of her initial time at the company, Delaney is rotated among different teams. During each of these rotations, she proposes ideas, brainstormed by Wes and her, that are meant to be so invasive and offensive to the public that they would damage the reputation of The Every once they are released. However, to her surprise and dismay, the public well-received each idea. Wes's stature at The Every continues to grow, and he tells Delaney that he is no longer interested in working against the company. During this time, she receives increasingly distressed letters from her college professor, Meena Agarwal, an anti-monopolist who strongly opposes The Every and is upset that Delaney is working there.
One of the employees Delaney meets is Gabriel Chu, who eventually subjects her to a private interrogation to determine why she is at The Every. He uses the truth-detector application that grew out of Delaney's interview prototype. Delaney realizes that she has been unable to hide her true intent from Gabriel. However, he later tells her that he is part of an organized resistance within The Every, with goals similar to Delaney's.
Delaney eventually is invited to meet with Mae Holland, the CEO of The Every (and the protagonist of The Circle). After the meeting, Mae proposes that they go hiking alone in Idaho. Delaney detours to Oregon to visit Professor Agarwal and is shocked to learn that she has accepted a job at The Every. Delaney and Mae meet for a hike to a cliff with a view of a waterfall. On the way up, Delaney proposes her most radical idea yet, which involves rolling all of the metrics that The Every is currently privately gathering about people into a single, public score that evaluates a person's total value. At the top of the falls, it is revealed that Mae is aware of Delaney's plans, in coordination with Gabriel Chu, and that the resistance is fake. Mae, who has intentionally turned off all tracking of the hike and has been wearing weighted men's boots on the hike to throw off any investigation, pushes Delaney off of the cliff.
The book ends with Mae preparing to present her idea for a radical new application to an audience at The Every.
A November 2021 review in The Guardian called Eggers "a wonderful storyteller with an alert and defiant vision", and, comparing the book to The Circle, described it as "longer and baggier, but still fuelled by rage at the power of Silicon Valley and its numbing effect on the human race".
The New York Times described the book as "moving relentlessly from one mocking sendup of tech culture to the next" but also stated "for a defense of nuance and unpredictability, 'The Every' exhibits a startling lack of both" and complains "Very little is left to interpretation...I wished, often, to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, exercise my own subjectivity — that same endangered faculty the novel mourns...For a long novel, the story is strikingly static, its message so unchanging that a plot never really develops."
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