A tense and atmospheric literary thriller. . . . I Am No One is deft and trenchant, a pertinent investigation of ‘the ways this nation has contorted its gaze back on itself.’” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Flanery has proved himself to be a refreshingly astute observer of ideas of nationhood, exile, censorship, and surveillance. . . . Like an attractive crossbreed of Brideshead Revisited and Javier Marias’s All Souls. . . . In I Am No One, we find a writer standing on the border between the immediate and the allegorical, the personal and the political, the thriller and the novel of ideas. It raises the enticing question of where Flanery’s bold imagination will choose to transport us to next.” —Jonathan Lee, The New York Times Book Review
"A seductive and frightening novel." —NPR.org
“An unnerving allegory. . . . The novel ensnares us in its noir-like web of anxiety.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
"A superbly-written and elegant novel." —The Huffington Post
“Flanery relays all of the necessary information with tick-tock, masterful precision. . . . There’s a real pleasure in keeping up with his fast and omnivorous intellect.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“I Am No One reads like a collaboration between spy novelist John le Carre and Franz Kafka. . . . It's at once a beautifully written slow-motion thriller, an unnerving story of fear and paranoia, and a cautionary tale about the perils of spy satellites, security cameras and electronic surveillance by faceless government bureaucrats.” —The Associated Press
“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. . . . There are parts of the story that stand out as thrilling, next to other parts that are meditative, and others that are psychologically baffling. . . . One of the pleasures of reading Flanery is the tussle between ways of understanding the shapes of stories and language.” —A.S. Byatt, The Guardian
"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
“A superbly entertaining novel. . . . The tension is delicious. . . . I Am No One’s relevance today is without question, and its du jour subject matter is persuasively treated. It’s also a brilliant work of suspense.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“In I Am No One, Patrick Flanery has laid bare the fear of our digital age. Part Mr. Robot, part Don DeLillo, part Edward Snowden—this thrilling, unnerving novel defies genre and raises trenchant questions about privacy, identity, and fate. I Am No One is a disquieting must-read, a book to start right after you delete your browsing history and change all of your passwords.” —Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This
“Flanery’s brilliantly sly and funny book updates Nabokov’s Cold War story of despotic power to the present day . . . The fear that we are watched is no longer the province of isolated fantasists but a new fact of everyday life.” —Kate Webb, The Spectator
“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
"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, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
"A masterful plot, a terrifying subject, and a gripping read . . . Patrick Flanery’s topical, multi-layered novel probes the ubiquitous culture of surveillance today and its potential ramifications for a democratic society." —Lucy Popescu, The Independent on Sunday
“Thoughtful, meticulously written, and slow burning . . . A story that is a warning of the dangers of mass surveillance, but also a meditation on the frailty of individual identity when it is shaken by personal and social breakdown, and by the dislocation of expatriate life.” —The Independent
“Electrifying and thought-provoking . . . Flanery’s meditations on observation, data collection and protection contribute new insight and convey fresh chills.” —The National
2016-04-13
A university professor worries about lost privacy and past sins after receiving cartons filled with years of personal data in this blend of psychological and political suspense. When Jeremy O'Keefe failed to get tenure at Columbia, he took a post at Oxford University shortly after the 9/11 attacks, even acquiring British citizenship in the course of more than 10 years in the U.K. As the novel opens with Jeremy's first-person narration, he has recently returned to the U.S. to teach at New York University, his chief area of interest being 20th-century German history, with a specialization in the Stasi and its informants. Then his seemingly comfortable, unremarkable life is overturned in the course of a few weeks. He receives from an anonymous sender four boxes containing a breadth of personal data—URLs, phone traffic, photos— that suggests something only a government agency could organize. Jeremy also repeatedly encounters a man who knows his wealthy son-in-law and behaves oddly enough to make Jeremy suspicious of him. As he searches his memory for possible causes and culprits, Jeremy revisits his years in England and wonders about incidents when he might have offended someone. There was also an unsavory colleague who compelled him to help a woman gain acceptance to Oxford. Could the woman's Egyptian background include terrorist ties? The question of why Jeremy has fallen under Big Brother's unblinking gaze—or even if he has—is left ambiguous, but Flanery (Fallen Land, 2013, etc.) makes his protagonist's flaws common enough to let him serve as Everyman at a time when innocence might be irrelevant in a world that "assumes guilt by algorithmic association." Less judicious is the writer's decision to have Jeremy withhold from the narrative for a while vital information that is clearly ever present in his memory because doing so is useful to Flanery as novelist. This is a worthy addition to the growing shelf on the erosion of personal privacy in the service of public security.
