I am No One by Patrick Flanery

Set in the post-Snowden era of creeping surveillance of ordinary citizens and everyday life, I Am No One explores how a world without privacy is a world without freedom of expression.

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.

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