Three separate stories make up this incredible novel. Miles Cheshire has been looking for his twin brother, Hayden for about ten years. Lucy has left home with her former high school teacher, looking for a new life. Ryan walks away from his life after learning a startling truth, and is presumed dead by his family.

Chaon expertly weaves these stories together until they are connected. All the characters seem to be lost and are looking to remake themselves. Miles has spent so much time looking for his brother, he has forgotten to live his own life. Lucy doesn't quite end up with the adventure she was looking for. Ryan seems to be in over his head with his new life.

my review: I thought this novel was fantastic; suspenseful and well-written. I was hooked from the beginning. We learn bits and pieces of each character, yet we don't learn much at all. I liked the theme of stolen identities, both literally and figuratively. Ryan and his biological dad that he never knew, steal identities for credit card theft and moving money around. Miles' brother, creates several different identities, making it difficult for Miles to locate him.

I found this especially interesting as the idea of just changing your identity and starting anew has an appeal for me on some very stressful days, or when the bills pile up!

It's hard to say too much with out giving anything away, so let me just say I really enjoyed this and definitely recommend it.

my rating 5/5 ( )

Three interlocking narratives propel the complex story of this fascinating novel. In one story, Ryan Schuyler and his father Jay Kozelek run identity-theft scams after Ryan runs away from college upon discovery that “Uncle” Jay was actually his biological father. In the second story, recent high-school graduate and orphan Lucy Lattimore runs away from her small and tedious town with George Orson, a charismatic young high school teacher who ends up enmeshing the girl in a dangerous embezzlement plot. And in the third story, hapless underachiever Miles Cheshire is searching…yet again…for his missing and possibly schizophrenic twin brother Hayden who has been on the run for ten years, changing identities like suits. As the stories, at first seemingly unrelated, progress, surprising connections begin to emerge. To reveal more about those connections would be to ruin the journey.

A complex story woven together with seemingly effortless skill, “Await Your Reply” is both a thriller and a literary novel, both a story about identity theft and about identity itself. ( )

Enjoyable thriller. I figured out what was going on about 1/3 of the way through, but that didn't diminish the shocks, twists and turns. Very well paced and well constructed. Recommended. ( )

two boys, twins, lead separate lives. Miles is sane and Hayden is something else.
Miles attempts to locate his twin tirelessly for years and finds he is living in an alternate world and yet destroying lives as he goes. ( )

Don’t be fooled by the title of Dan Chaon’s new novel, which has appeared on many best of the year lists for 2009. It sounds like it should be a quiet domestic novel, but in fact it’s a riveting page turner, filled with suspense and dark paranoia. It open with three separate storylines – In the first, a young man is in the back of a car. His severed hand is in a cooler next to him. In another storyline, a young woman and her lover, who happens to be her high school English teacher, are fleeing their homes in the Midwest for a mysterious fortune. In the last, a middle aged man hunts desperately for the schizophrenic twin brother who disappeared ten years ago, destroying their lives in his wake. These three narratives become on by the book’s end, a meditation of the nature (or absence) of identity in our 21st-century culture. The fragmented personae of the books characters, and the conspiracy theories that drive them to their ultimate destinations, are exhilarating and raw. A truly marvelous book. ( )

Who are you? Is your identity static, defined only by your past experiences? Or is it dynamic, able to be created, altered, or eliminated as you move along in life? Await Your Reply, the new novel by National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon, raises questions about and suggests implications of modern identity while weaving together the story of three characters trying to figure out their own identities.

Await Your Reply follows three ordinary characters in less than ordinary circumstances. Ryan, a college sophomore, finds out he is adopted and disappears from his crumbling life to enter the world of identity theft. Lucy decides to leave her sleepy hometown, swept away by her charming high school teacher who promises her adventure and fortune, only to end up in a motel in Nebraska. Miles has given up living his own life, and possibly his hold on his sanity, in a desperate search to find his long-lost, possibly schizophrenic, twin brother.

Chaon uses the mundane details of the characters’ lives—Ryan sitting in a rental car office; Lucy watching movies in the motel; Miles at his job in a novelty shop—to cultivate the core essence of the novel. These meaningless details show that “most people . . . [have] identities that [are] so shallow that you could easily manage a hundred of them at once.” A person’s identity is so often defined by one’s job, hobby, or favorite movie—superficial attributes that can easily be culled from an Internet search—that anyone with a little determination could actually maintain several separate and disparate identities at the same time. It’s the ramifications of these multiple identities that propel the story to its satisfying conclusion.

As is often the case in real life, the small details in Await Your Reply can easily be overlooked by the reader as insignificant. It is not until the end that the reader is able to put everything together and realize what’s been happening the whole time. Await Your Reply is a novel that begs to be reread as soon as the reader finishes the final page. ( )

In this gripping literary thriller, Chaon weaves together three distinct story lines, each with its own set of fully formed characters, including a father-son team of identity thieves, a high school teacher who skips town with his favorite female student, and a man searching for his mentally-ill twin brother. The plot switches from story to story until, in the final one-third of the book, the stories come together in surprising ways.
Throughout it all, Chaon's primary concern is the concept of human identity. Chaon's characters grapple with what it means to change names, escape from families and towns, and alter appearances. We are left wondering if a person has a fixed identity (a true essence) or if identity is merely relative, shifting according to circumstances and desires. The answer to this question suggested by Chaon is unsettling and thought-provoking. Chaon's workmanlike prose maintains a quick pace, making for a real page-turner. Await Your Reply combines a high entertainment value with literary depth.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )

"What life will you choose for yourselves?" a father asks of his identical twin sons in Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply. An innocent enough question many parents have asked, but in the hands of Chaon the various answers to this question are the core of this suspenseful page-turner. Three inter-locking story lines propel the reader from rural Wisconsin to the Arctic Circle to Peru as their characters alternately run away from and headlong toward the lives they think they have chosen for themselves.

This book kept me up too late to finish and then even later to re-read it looking for clues I'd missed. I don't want to say too much more about this book, but if you like great characters and a stunning plot, you won't be disappointed. Wow. ( )

This quietly creepy thriller is ostensibly about identity theft, but it’s really about the meaning and flexibility of identity, the search for connection, and the desire to be known…or to become entirely unknown.

In three alternative narrative lines, Chaon chronicles a young man’s search for his missing—potentially schizophrenic—twin brother, a teenage girl’s attempt to begin a new life by running away with her history teacher (who drives a Maserati, though no one knows how he manages to afford it), and a college student who receives surprising news about his true identity and simply walks out of his life at Northwestern University, allowing everyone to believe he is dead.

Await Your Reply is engaging from the very first page and moves along at a steady clip. More intellectual than action-packed, this is a psychological thriller that will force even the most careful readers to wonder whether they caught all the details. Chaon plays it close to the vest, and the reward for paying close attention is great. ( )

This is a perfect bookclub book. You won't be able to get it out of your head, and you won't be able to wait to talk about it with someone else who has read it. Full of mindbending twists, gorgeous observations, and haunting themes of identity. ( )

Await Your Reply is a fantastic story with brilliant characters and a complete page turner. Nothing is as it seems. My first Dan Chaon book and I was not dissapointed.

This novel is told as three interwoven stories whose connections only become clear toward the very end of the book. It is a tribute to Chaon's abilities as a writer that these stories do mesh so unexpectedly well and that the reader is carried along far enough to see the connections. This is a sparse and dismal tale of self-definition and identity that sparks questions about who any of us really are inside our own minds and to the people around us.

Miles is haunted by the twin who disappeared, but never completely, whose forceful and potentially false memories of their shared childhood continue to keep Miles separated from reality and questioning his own existence. Ryan is haunted by his memories of his own failures and what he sees as his betrayal by his parents; his active attempt to remove himself from the world has far-reaching consequences. Orphaned Lucy is haunted by the life she fears she'll never have, the choices she won't have the opportunity to make; though her decision to runaway is brought on by a desire to remake herself, she finds it more difficult than expected to abandon her own knowledge of who she truly is.

This masterful work was a surprisingly quick read and yet raised questions that are still floating unanswered in my mind. Highly recommended- this book will stay with you. ( )

Dan Chaon's novel, Await Your Reply, is a collection of three stories that converge into one remarkable resolution at the very end of the novel. Chaon does a fantastic job of weaving the characters together and giving brief insights into the plot's direction. Chaon's characters are vivid and have great personality. The characters bring out a litany of emotions in the reader - empathy, disgust, hope, and trepidation to name a few. Chaon's novel is a great accomplishment in saying so much without wearing down the reader with too much description and detail. The story is vague without being confusing. Chaon obviously expects the reader to be able to connect the dots without being bashed over the head. Well done! ( )

http://coyotewandering.wordpress.com/... ( )

I liked this book a lot. Heard about it on NPR. The book is marketed as being about identity theft, but to my mind it is more about identity construction--whether stolen from another, or created out of thin air. We all go about "inventing ourselves" in one way or another, and this book plays with that idea in ways both subtle, and at times, perverse and evil. I related strongly to the book as it dealt with these themes.

There is a big mystery to this book, which makes it quite a page-turner. However, the NPR review led me to believe that the last 5 pages of the book would leave me "stunned"--they did not, as I had figured out the mystery about 50 pages before that.

The weakest aspect of the book, and the only reason I did not give it 5 stars, it that Chaon uses its eliptical style to hide facts that would belie the mystery. This seems to me to make the mystery somewhat contrived.

NONE THE LESS, A VERY GOOD READ and one which I highly recommend. ( )

This novel sells itself... As soon as you read the opening pages you'll be hooked. Dan Chaon's intricately-plotted novel opens in the middle of the night with a father rushing his son to the hospital. "Listen to me, Son: You are not going to bleed to death." The son's hand is in a cooler on the front seat.

Elsewhere in the night, freshly-minted, eighteen-year-old grad Lucy Lattimore has just surreptitiously left town with her former high-school history teacher, George Orson. They're making "a clean break" together.

The final narrative strand is the story of Miles Cheshire and his--Dare I say it?--evil twin. Miles has been looking for his twin brother, Hayden, for more than a decade. As the novel opens, he's approaching the Arctic Circle in far northern Canada on this latest quest.

What do these people have in common? All of them have huge mysteries in their lives. Many of them appear to be engaged in illegal activities. From the start, the reader knows that there are connections. They are tantalizingly close, but nothing in Chaon's novel is obvious, and revelations don't come easily. The author plays with time, like an artist playing with perspective, to further obfuscate connections. Not all of the stories are told in a linear manner. Meanwhile, the characters explore the very concept of identity. And so many questions are raised... Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

Constantly while I read Await Your Reply, I kept thinking, How did he do this? He, being Dan Chaon, who has written a complexly-plotted and compulsively-readable thriller that is also a work of incredible literary beauty. Await Your Reply is an amazing accomplishment. You won't be able to put it down. Once you've followed all the trails and unraveled the last clues, you'll be blown away! What are you waiting for? ( )

Dan Chaon's new novel uses the suspense genre in the service of literature, but if you like, you can forget about the literature and just enjoy this as a cerebral thriller in the High Paranoid style. The stories (there are three) all revolve around questions of identity and how easily one can lose it, intentionally or not.

The three stories will eventually converge into a coherent whole but they are fascinating on their own. Miles Cheshire has spent ten years obsessively searching for Hayden, his schizophrenic identical twin. Teenage Lucy has left home in the company of one of her high school teachers, in search of adventure, glamor and wealth. Ryan has dropped out of college and taken up with Jay, an unsavory character - and his biological father.

Each of the stories is compelling. Chaon's prose is economical and powerful, and his characters are finely drawn - as they feel their own sense of immutable "real-ness" dissolving, they are vividly real to the reader.

The structure of the novel is a thing of beauty, and contributes to the overall power of the work. It is obvious from the start of the novel that all things are not what they seem, but Chaon is fair to the reader, and by the end of the novel one feels moved, not manipulated. ( )

I’m a sucker for character driven novels. I also love stories that intersect in surprising ways. It was obvious that I was going to enjoy this book from reading a review in Entertainment Weekly (no joke!). The story is based on three different story lines happening at different times, though you don’t know that until the final third of the book. There are three main characters: Miles Cheshire, who is looking for his schizophrenic brother Hayden; there’s Lucy Lattimore, who has run off with her charismatic high school teacher George Orson; then there’s Ryan Schuyler who discovers that his parents aren’t really his parents but his aunt and her husband. He meets his long lost father, Jay Kozekek. A lot of this novel interesects with the theme of self identity, but it also intersects in surprising ways. Rather than spoil it for you, just go ahead and read it. The first 2/3 is full of great characters and the final 1/3 connects those characters. A note about the pacing of the novel: the book isn’t particularly plot driven for the first 2/3. When do you do reach the final 1/3, it takes on a phrenetic pace. I particularly enjoyed the set up and the outcome of this book! Must read more Dan Chaon … ( )

AMAZING!
Haunting, depressing, sad, incredible. It felt like reading a Hitchcock novel!
A book split into thirds, you don't know till the end how/why they are related,but it is un-put-downable.
A story about identity, loneliness, magicians, con-men, reinventing ones self, brothers, abandonment.
Ryan/Jay .. Miles... George/Lucy....Hayden....Mike Hayden.....Breez........
Chaon's fluid writing just keeps getting better!!! His character development is unmatched. ( )

What, exactly, defines a person’s identity and how is it distinct from one’s personality? Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply weaves the stories of three characters whose lives intertwine in ways they cannot imagine in order to look at this question.

The story is written in chapters that alternate each of the main characters voices. In spite of the complex nature of the story, with multiple threads and timelines flowing one into the other, the story never gets too complicated to enjoy or loses its pacing.

The three storylines center around Ryan, a student whose discovery that he is adopted turns his once predictable future on its head; Miles, searching for his schizophrenic twin Hayden, who has kept in touch just enough to hook Miles into searching for him and not getting on with his own life; Lucy who runs away with her high school history teacher, searching for something more out of life.

All three of them have one thing in common, but it is up to the reader to figure out what it is. Each of the characters was believable, and the premise of the story so well relayed that it was natural to believe that this could really happen. This book kept me thinking all through the single afternoon in which I finished it. It was a gripping mystery, but at the same time, much more.

Anyone who loves a good mystery, but especially readers who don’t just want the formulaic read, will enjoy Await Your Reply. I myself look forward to Mr. Chaon’s backlist and his future offerings.

A well-crafted and thought-provoking novel that, while clearly written for the head rather than the heart, manages to strike a nerve at just the right moment to make it a distinctly memorable -- and admirable -- piece of literature. More at http://bookhopping.wordpress.com ( )

Identity crisis? This new novel has identity issues in spades. There are three different story-lines and as these disjointed characters wander along these pages searching for themselves, they eventually stumble and blend into one another. Complex and challenging? Yes, but the narrative flows smoothly and as the puzzle pieces fall into place,you will find your rewards. A heady mix of Bergman's Persona with Pulp Fiction's time-bending structure. Highly recommended! ( )

This is the first book I have read by Dan Chaon so I wasn't sure what to expect of his writing. I have to admit, I was pulled in with that first chapter. The multiple storylines were not hard to follow and they did interwine by the end of the book. (Although I don't really like getting pulled into one character's story then having to wait and go to another.) It was not the type of book I typically read but I did enjoy it.

Was it worth reading...yes. Would I read another book by this author...maybe. ( )

This is an amazing book that sucks you in from the very first line. The concept of identity in this era of Facebook, YouTube, etc. is an interesting and ever-changing one and the author does an outstanding job with this subject. Each of the three stories is wonderfully compelling. I do admit to spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out how they were connected but I enjoyed every minute of that time. I would highly recommend this book.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon … what can I say? It is an unusual novel. It is both a mystery and a psychological study of identity. The novel is divided into three stories with the chapters cycling between them. A common thread – identity and who you are – binds the stories together and is clearly evident. In one story, Miles Chesire, wanting to get on with his life, has received a letter from his twin brother, Hayden, pulling him back into a global game of hide and seek. Another story centers around, Ryan, a college drop out, whose hand has been severed under mysterious circumstances. And in the final story, we have Lucy, a recent high school graduate who leaves town with her high school teacher. Each of these individual is searching for something but what is that something. Is it love, a sense of belonging, closure, etc...? In their search, these individuals will need to come to terms with who and what they are.

While reading, I had a gnawing sense of familiarity and definitely saw strong parallels between two of the stories. Is there a connection between all the stories? This question will keep you reading (and thinking). I found Mr. Chaon to be quite adept at describing the little details – from a neglected motel in an abandoned US town to a hotel in Africa and a quaint little town in Ecuador – you feel as though you are there and witnessing everything. The stories were well paced and the characters well developed. Some may find the interweaving of chapters a bit disconcerting; however, the book is a page turner (I read it in one sitting). Some may not even like the characters as they are dark and strange – I only found one to be likable. Mr. Chaon's characters could be someone you know – they are ordinary people just trying to find themselves; however, some of the means taken to do so are questionable and may leave you wondering how well/if you know someone. I have always felt that you can never really know someone – you can only know what they allow you to see – truth or not.

I highly recommend. ( )