Fake Accounts

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE PRIZE

A wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity, authenticity and the self in the age of the internet

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous Internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in Internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York – or be anywhere in particular – she flees to Berlin, and embarks on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat social events, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms.

Narrated in a voice as seductive as it is subtly subversive, Fake Accounts is a wry, provocative and very funny debut novel about identity and authenticity in the age of the internet.

“'Fake Accounts is an absorbing and shameless examination of the way self-mythologies are forged and performed in the public privacy of the internet. Fans of Lauren Oyler's ferocious criticism will love this 21st century comedy of bad manners' Catherine Lacey, author of Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers 'Only if a novelist is traditional in the right ways--in her moral intelligence, in her complex eloquence, in her patient plotting--can she properly register the real newness of our hurtling world of social media and a mediatized society. Lauren Oyler has written a very funny and serious contemporary novel. You must pick it up if you read fiction and/or tweets' Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis”

‘This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it’ Zadie Smith

‘A sharply observed and wryly funny satire on the banal sociopathy of online life’ Sunday Times

A furiously vivid account of living online and an exploration of the fake and real versions of ourselves we slip between.’ ESQUIRE

‘Terrific…provides much food for thought .’ Birmingham Mail

‘Thoughtful, inquiring and independent-minded’ James Mariott, The Times

Fake Accounts questions who we are in real life and who we pretend to be online… Prepare to feel very seen.’
i-D

‘A probing examination of identity and authenticity in the online age, and the lies we like to tell ourselves’
ANOTHER

‘Social media has lurked in the background of contemporary literary fiction … but here it feels finally, fully and thoroughly explored, with style and originality. I felt sharpened by it, grateful for its provocations …’ New York Times

'A searingly funny, smart, revealing novel. Oyler's fiction is as insightful and probing as her criticism' Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them A Good Time

‘[A] unique, ferociously modern voice. This incisive, funny work brilliantly captures the claustrophobia of lives led online and personally tested in the real world’ Publishers Weekly

‘Fake Accounts percolates the big moral questions of our age – fraudulence, identity as performance, surveillance capitalism, political instability, personal freedom – through a narrative arc driven ingeniously by low-level dopamine hits. At the same time, it is very, very funny. Oyler is the kind of dangerous contemporary writer we need more of’ Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy and winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award 2020

Lauren Oyler is based in Brooklyn, and also spends time in Berlin. Her essays on books and culture have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, New York Magazine's The Cut, Bookforum, the Baffler and the New Republic, among other publications.

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