Chris Power & Lauren Oyler in Conversation

Join us as we welcome two authors whose respective debut novels have been met with universal acclaim: Chris Power, author of A LONELY MAN, and Lauren Oyler, author of FAKE ACCOUNTS. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

Robert is a struggling writer living in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. One night he meets Patrick, an enigmatic stranger with a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch – recently found hanged – who is now being followed. But is he really in danger? Patrick’s life strikes Robert as a fabrication, but one that comes to obsess him. He decides to use the other man, and his story.

An elegant and atmospheric twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is a novel of shadows, of the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As his association with Patrick hurtles towards tragedy, Robert must decide: are actual events the only things that give a story life, and are some stories too dangerous to tell?

Chris Power is the author of Mothers, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. He lives in London. His debut novel, A LONELY MAN, was published by Faber & Faber in April 2021.

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.

Lauren Oyler is a New York-based writer who was born and raised in West Virginia, and spends a lot of 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, Harper’s, the Guardian, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Bookforum, the Baffler, the New Republic, and elsewhere. Her first novel, FAKE ACCOUNTS, was published by 4th Estate in February 2021.