You Shall Know Our Velocity is Dave Egger’s story of two twenty-something men who find themselves with a windfall of cash and a case of wanderlust that carries them across the Atlantic into Africa and Eastern Europe with the hope of giving all the money away. Mutual absurdity seems to be the glue that holds the friendship between the two adventurers together—they are eccentric, immature, irresponsible, juvenile, and largely ignorant of what they are doing. Yet, there is something pure in their intentions. Underneath years of hooliganary, teenage experimentation, sin, and antics, they are idealists searching for true acts of love. What the journey unveils is not just a search for pure action, but also a search for an answer from the heavens, from the universe, from God. The death of a close friend has ravaged the souls of the two often juvenile but sometimes piercingly sensitive men, and each in their own way is trying to sort out what the world will show them. It is a search for the hidden code of a world abroad that may unveil the extent of their loss and the meaning of the gaping absence left by death. In certain flashes there is some light shown through people they meet, often just enough to keep Will, our narrator, just above the madness, despair, and existential crisis that threaten his annihilation. The journey through the pages of Egger’s book is often full of the ridiculous, much like a twenty first century On The Road smashed together with Dumb and Dumber; but its sporadic flashes of ambiguous nudges from something greater is what the novel truly hinges on.