Author(s): Lauren Oyler

Novel | Humour & Satire

A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive debut novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they've all promised, and the lies they help us tell. 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. Actually, she's relieved--he was always a little distant--and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. 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 and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual? Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.

Review:

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

'Compulsively readable' Irish Times

'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

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

Author Biography: 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.