The Secret Life

Starred review from July 17, 2017
This splendid collection from novelist O’Hagan (The Illuminations) brings together three essays originally published in the London Review of Books that explore identity in the digital age through three figures: Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks; Craig Steven Wright, who may or may not be the creator of bitcoin; and Ronald “Ronnie” Pinn, who, despite a U.K. passport, mailing address, and gaggle of Facebook friends, is not real. The piece on Assange would be the standout in an ordinary essay collection, but this is not one of those, and O’Hagan’s study of the Australian hacker, for whom he once ghostwrote the first draft of an autobiography, while absorbing, pales in comparison with the profile of Wright (who comes across as an eccentric but altogether more likable character than the narcissistic Assange). But it is Ronnie Pinn, a digital identity created by O’Hagan based on a name from a headstone, whose pseudoexistence says the most about who we are now. O’Hagan’s grasp of storytelling is prodigious, and the ending of his essay on Pinn is a particularly inspired, even moving, piece of writing. Taken as a whole, this is an unmissable collection of up-to-the-moment insights about life in our digital era. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.)

August 1, 2017
Three intriguing pieces of journalism about the new threats of a digital age.O'Hagan (The Illuminations, 2015, etc.) is known as a three-time Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist, but he's also a razor-sharp London-based reporter, as evidenced by these three stories from "the wild west of the Internet, before policing or a code of decency." His subjects are diverse and mostly well-known. In the first, "Ghosting," the author describes how he assumed the unenviable position of ghostwriting the autobiography/manifesto of Julian Assange, the infamously imperiled WikiLeaks founder. "It needs to be more like Ayn Rand," said Assange during one of their strange meetings. "I don't know if I can help you with that," was the author's straightforward reply. Describing his subject as "a cornered animal," O'Hagan delivers a troubling portrait of paranoia, trespasses, and consequences that feels unique because of the writer's unique proximity to his subject. The second work, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," is equally dark, chronicling O'Hagan's successful attempt to create a real identity for a long-dead man. He succeeded in generating an income with Bitcoins and buying heroin and counterfeit money online. "To the moderators of Silk Road or Agora," writes the author, "the world is an inchoate mass of desires and deceits, and everything that exists can be bought or sold, including selfhood, because to them freedom means stealing power back from the state, or God, or Apple, or Freud. To them, life is a drama in which power rubs out one's name; they are anonymous, ghosts in the machine, infiltrating and weakening the structures of the state and partying as they do, causing havoc, encrypting who they are." The third story, "The Satoshi Affair," finds O'Hagan tapped to reveal the identity of Craig Wright, an awkward Australian computer scientist, as "Satoshi Nakamoto," the cryptic inventor of Bitcoin, only to find that even his real subjects can be frauds after all. Three well-written but fleeting vignettes from some of the darkest edges of the internet.

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September 1, 2017
An acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction with three Man Booker Prize nominations to his credit, O'Hagan (The Illuminations, 2015) is keenly aware of the shifting boundaries between truth and creative artifice, especially concerning matters of identity. His latest collection of essays reports on three cases from the digital frontier, where the lines defining a given public persona become blurred and confused with a manufactured alter ego on the Internet. Ghosting recounts the author's misadventures ghostwriting an autobiography for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an assignment O'Hagan accepted only on the condition that his name never be associated with the project (until now), even for interviews, effectively making himself anonymous. In The Invention of Ronnie Pinn, O'Hagan describes how he borrowed the identity of a deceased Londoner to fabricate a life online that led him into areas of the web's underworld. The Satoshi Affair profiles Craig Wright, an identity that may or may not be an alias for legendary Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. As in his previous works, O'Hagan's display of literary skill and human insight is first-rate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 15, 2017

London Review of Books (LRB) editor at large and Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist O'Hagan (The Illuminations) is an expert in the art of the long-form essay. In this lightly updated collection of three pieces originally published in the LRB, the author provides a compelling examination of selfhood and identity for three distinct personalities wrought in the blurring lines of fact and fiction online. The strongest is "Ghosting," about O'Hagan's attempt to ghostwrite Julian Assange's autobiography in 2011, with O'Hagan displaying a knack for capturing moments of levity despite his frustration as Assange causes the project's derailment. In "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," O'Hagan journeys to the Dark Web to develop an identity for the titular Pinn, who died pre-Internet and has no digital footprint, raising important, difficult questions of the ethics involved in telling someone else's story. The final piece, "The Satoshi Affair," offers a thrilling dive into the fraught world of Craig Wright, who claims to be the mysterious bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto but won't reveal the evidence to prove it. VERDICT A thought-provoking, eminently readable sui generis examination of selfhood from a master storyteller; highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17; "Editors' Fall Picks," 9/1/17.]--Amanda Mastrull, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2017

Granta Best of Young British Novelists O'Hagan crafts three essays asking what's real and who's who in cyberspace. "The Invention of Ronnie Pinn," for instance, shows him taking the identity of a deceased young man and creating someone wholly new online, while "The Satoshi Affair" considers whether Australian web developer Craig Wright is Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2017

London Review of Books (LRB) editor at large and Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist O'Hagan (The Illuminations) is an expert in the art of the long-form essay. In this lightly updated collection of three pieces originally published in the LRB, the author provides a compelling examination of selfhood and identity for three distinct personalities wrought in the blurring lines of fact and fiction online. The strongest is "Ghosting," about O'Hagan's attempt to ghostwrite Julian Assange's autobiography in 2011, with O'Hagan displaying a knack for capturing moments of levity despite his frustration as Assange causes the project's derailment. In "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," O'Hagan journeys to the Dark Web to develop an identity for the titular Pinn, who died pre-Internet and has no digital footprint, raising important, difficult questions of the ethics involved in telling someone else's story. The final piece, "The Satoshi Affair," offers a thrilling dive into the fraught world of Craig Wright, who claims to be the mysterious bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto but won't reveal the evidence to prove it. VERDICT A thought-provoking, eminently readable sui generis examination of selfhood from a master storyteller; highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17; "Editors' Fall Picks," 9/1/17.]--Amanda Mastrull, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.