4th Estate clinches Oyler's debut about secret online identities

4th Estate will publish Lauren Oyler's debut novel, exploring sex, feminism and politics as well as deception across online identities in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump's election.

Commissioning editor Anna Kelly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to debut novel Fake Accounts, by Oyler, from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Alia Hanna Habib at The Gernert Company.

Catapult will publish in the US and publication is slated for spring 2021 in the UK and US.

Oyler has written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine among other publications. Fake Accounts, is set in New York and Berlin and follows a young woman in the aftermath of Trump’s election in 2016, who discovers by snooping on her boyfriend’s phone that he has a secret second identity online, and from there embarks on her own cycle of deception and fabrication.

Kelly says: "Lauren Oyler is an original thinker and a superb stylist and her protagonist in Fake Accounts is both gloriously honest and shamelessly deceitful. Oyler cuts through cliché to present a complex, layered exploration of sex, feminism, politics, and how the internet has fractured our sense of self, and her novel is as outrageously funny and entertaining as it is serious, insightful and thought-provoking."