Patrick Flanery was born in California and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a B.F.A. in Film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he worked in the film industry before moving to the U.K., where he completed a doctorate in twentieth-century English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of the novels Absolution, which was shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Fallen Land. He has written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of Reading.
“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
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