I Am No One

Description

Jeremy O'Keefe, a middle-aged Professor of History, returns to his native New York after a decade teaching at Oxford, hoping to reconnect with his daughter and rebuild the life he left behind. He settles into the rhythm of a too-empty life, long evenings alone after a day teaching students he barely knows. Then a strange encounter with a young man who presumes an acquaintance he doesn't remember and a series of disconcerting events leave him with a growing conviction that he is being watched. The pale young man keeps appearing, a haunting figure lingers outside his apartment at night, and then mysterious packages begin to arrive. As his grip on reality seems to shift and turn, Jeremy struggles to know whether he can believe what he is experiencing, or whether his mind is in the grip of an irrational obsession. I Am No One explores the tenuous link between fear and paranoia in our post-Snowden lives; a world of surveillance and self-censorship, where privacy no longer exists and our freedoms are inexorably eroded.

Patrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. He studied Film at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and earned a PhD in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. He contributes articles to a number of academic journals and he has written for Slightly Foxed, the Daily Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement. He has published two novels to critical acclaim, Absolution in 2012 and Fallen Land in 2013. He lives in London.

A passionate, gripping, brilliantly voiced and scintillatingly intelligent novel about that cancer afflicting modern democratic states - the surveillance of its own people. Were we ever told that democracy would entail this? I Am No One will get under your skin, leave you jittery and unsettled, and have you looking over your shoulder. -- Neel Mukherjee, author of THE LIVES OF OTHERS, shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Costa Novel Awards 2014 and won the Encore Award 2015 A taut, nervy, confident thriller for the surveillance age from a writer with an uncanny sense of the anxieties and fears that define the modern condition. -- Hanya Yanagihara, author of A LITTLE LIFE Flanery is a master of puzzling, alarming and even terrifying storytelling. -- A.S Byatt * Guardian * [Flanery is] gloriously talented * The Guardian - fiction highlights for 2016 * [A] superbly entertaining novel... a brilliant work of suspense... Its relevance today is without question, and its du jour subject matter is persuasively treated. * TLS * A hotly contemporary novel by a critically acclaimed American novelist about creeping paranoia in an age of mass surveillance. * The Independent: 'Best of 2016' * A masterful plot, a terrifying subject, and a gripping read. * Independent on Sunday * Patrick Flanery pulls off a rarity in the age of compartmentalized fiction: a novel of Pynchonesque paranoid ideas, wrapped in psychologically acute Jamesian prose, delivered by a gripping story worthy of Graham Greene. I Am No One is itself profoundly observant about the post-Snowden culture of surveillance, and the insights of this unsettling novel are ignored at our own peril. -- Teddy Wayne This is such a superb, addictive, startling read that it seeps into your psyche. Read I Am No One and look around you with trepidation at our post-Edward Snowden world. * The Herald * Disquieting... compelling -- Lucy Daniel * Daily Telegraph * [Flanery is] the author of [three] thoughtful, meticulously written and slow burning thrillers -- Gerard Woodward * Independent * I Am No One is a tremendous work of fiction. Its long, elegant sentences and intellectual inquisitiveness are reminiscent at times of Philip Roth, at others of European masters like Alberto Moravia... a brilliant novel that works equally as espionage thriller, cautionary warning, socio-political j'accuse and-most rewardingly for me-existential meditation -- Darragh McManus * Independent (Ireland) * One of the pleasures of reading Flanery is the tussle between ways of understanding the shapes of stories and language... he writes realist novels which show their awareness that realism is a self-conscious form like others. * Guardian * Superb... a brilliant novel that works equally as spy thriller, social commentary; and an existential meditiation. * Belfast Telegraph * A smart, chilling novel * Metro * Patrick Flanery writes a coolly urbane and intelligent prose that keeps its structure and poise from first page to last. It's a prose marvelously suited to its material. -- Lawrence Osborne, author of HUNTERS IN THE DARK