Challenging read poses questions about the role of cyberspace in our lives

It speaks to the Zeitgeist of our time and asks the question: are we being watched, who can we trust?

YOU are a middle-aged professor, you’ve recently left a cushy position at Oxford to return to your native United States of America, and settled (or unsettled) back into New York.

Your name’s Jeremy O’Keefe and you have a very ordinary life in many ways.

O’Keefe is glad to be back home; the move to Oxford and back to the States has been profitable for him.

He has sold his home in Oxford for a good price; he has easy access to his now married daughter Meredith and her husband Peter.

With a breathtaking ability to draw the reader into a complex plot, the author reveals that O’Keefe’s return to his home city is not quite as uncomplicated as he had expected.

He starts to believe that he is being stalked. But why?

I Am No One taps into our collective collaboration with social media and the fact that we are linked electronically at the flick of a mouse or keyboard.

There is a neat juxtaposition between the world of academia and the world of social media, where every word can be recorded.

Should we be paranoid? Well, yes, if you are Jeremy.

His life appears blameless but he has done something at Oxford that is going to follow him to New York.

He starts getting boxes delivered to his university flat, boxes that contain reams of information about him.

He is puzzled, he keeps running into the same young man and is aware that he is being watched by him. The question is why? This is a post-Snowden, post-9/11 novel about how the minute details of an ordinary life become spun into a narrative of something sinister.

Woven through the tale is Jeremy’s concern that he may in fact be going mad, a concern shared by his family.

Jeremy is a character you will either like or dis- like, but that doesn’t matter very much in the broader scope of the novel where he becomes a well-rounded and yet cypher-like figure if that is possible (it is in the hands of the author).

It speaks to the Zeitgeist of our time: are we being watched, who can we trust?

If a man with little to hide is terrified, then what if there is something to hide?

It’s about a world where we have become scared of being spied on.

But, equally, it is about a world where we put out more information in the public eye than ever before in the history of civilisation.

Strangely, it is also a love story, about a man and a young woman who may be his downfall or his salvation.

It’s about a father’s love for his daughter and his mother, and how ultimately we have to decide what side of the opaque curtain of lies and secrecy we want to be on. This is a challenging read. Evocative and frightening at times, unless you have nothing to hide, that is.

But the question will linger long afterwards: In a world gone mad about gathering intelligence, do any of us have nothing to hide?