Await Your Reply: A Novel

By Dan Chaon

BONUS: This edition contains an Await Your Reply discussion guide.

The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.

Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself–through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780345517029

Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon is the author of several books, including Ill Will, a national bestseller, named one of the ten best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly. Other works include the short story collection Stay Awake (2012), a finalist for the Story Prize; the national bestseller Await Your Reply; and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. Chaon’s fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthologies, and the O. Henry Collection. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction and the Shirley Jackson Award, and he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland.

Reviews for Await Your Reply

[csmith0406-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

While I did like the style of writing the time shifts were overly complex, the characters flat, the twist predictable and the ending both boring and unsatisfying. Clearly some people liked it, but I cannot recommend.

[kirstench · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved this.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

tells three stories that seem utterly unrelated for much of the book, so that I read Dan Chaon's book like I read a book of short stories; slowly, putting down the book between chapters, often for long stretches. Of course, this is a novel and the three different stories are each exciting and deal in some way with questions of identity and what it means to be lost. Ryan's a college student, but he's failing his classes and he's spent his tuition money, so when an uncle he'd heard about but never met shows up to tell him that he's his father, Ryan is ready to take off with his father for a cabin in Michigan without telling anyone. Lucy's parents died recently and she was living with her older sister while finishing high school. She falls in love with a teacher and they run away together to hide out in his childhood home in Nebraska. And Miles is always looking for his mentally unstable brother. He'll settle down somewhere, telling himself to forget Hayden and their shared past, but each time he receives a rare communication from his brother, he drops everything to try and find him again. This time it's a letter that draws him to the town of Inuvik, in the Northwest Territories.For a stretch it doesn't seem possible to draw these different stories together, then they gradually reveal similarities and echoes of each other, until I could see a thread uniting them. For the last part of the book, the stories merged and parted, then united. Despite an intricate plot stretched from the tundra to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the real strength of Await Your Reply is in the characters and how they relate to one another. How do we know who we are? If we assume another identity, are we the same person underneath? Which is quite a feat for a novel that features references to Lovecraft, a grisly mutilation, computer hacking and menacing Russians, among other things.

[joellegc-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A page turner!

[flint_riemen-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Some books are based on a particular idea, concepts, or questions. "Await your reply" is such a book, it is about identity theft and the question how much a person is able to design and shape their own identity. With this idea, Chaon has fashioned a relatively short and engaging novel. There are three main characters: Miles, searching for his twin brother, who changes identities as other people change their telephones; Ryan, who steels identities from others to make a living; and Lucy, who ran away from home in search of a new life. They are all orphans (in one way or another), and over the course of ~300 pages their at first seemingly disconnected stories intertwine. As with other such books that are conceived from a single starting point I did not really like the book. Sure, it is deftly constructed; take for example the way hints about the interconnection of the three main characters are scattered throughout the book, or how tension is generated toward the end. But here's the big But: There is too much technique and way too little feeling. I found two of the main characters (Miles and Lucy) particularly unlikely and unconvincing. Character development: there is (almost) none.Taken together: This would have been a really good book about identity if the author had put some work into the, well, identities of his characters.

[naidascrochet_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Await Your Reply is a story about three strangers whose lives are intertwined. At first you don't know how these peoples lives are connected, but as you keep reading, the truth is slowly revealed. Lucy leaves her small hometown in Ohio and runs away with her older History teacher with dreams of starting a wonderful new life. He takes her to a deserted house in Nebraska in the middle of nowhere and Lucy starts to notice his odd behavior. Soon enough Lucy finds a large sum of money hidden in his study, and begins to wonder if the man she loves isn't who he says he is.Ryan has just found out a disturbing secret about his parents and decides to run away. He leaves the University he attends hoping to start a new life. He finds his long lost father and winds up getting involved in some shady business.Miles and Hayden are twin brothers. Hayden is troubled, he is a paranoid schizophrenic. Miles is searching for his brother who has been missing for 10 years. As the story unfolds, he begins to put together pieces of the puzzle and gets closer to finding his long lost twin. This is the type of book you can read in one sitting, I really enjoyed it. This is also one of those books you can read when you don't know what you're in the mood to read next. Do you know what I mean? When you just want to read a good story, something that will grab and hold your attention. The pages just flow smoothly and before you know it you are completely emmersed in the plot. The storyline keeps you guessing as to what is going on and you begin to wonder about the characters. As I was reading, I felt like I was unraveling clues in the story. Dan Chaon really keeps you guessing until the very end.

[gary237 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Await Your Reply is an outstanding novel, with nicely developed characters, straight-forward writing style, and fast-paced introspective action. I thoroughly enjoyed Chaon's book that explores a vital turn of this century, fin de siècle theme. In the early years of the 21st Century, we are experiencing an end of the social mandate of identity. When someone can "steal" your identity, what exactly are they getting? Thieves can use your markers of self (e.g., birth certificate, SSN, high school transcripts) to take money from your bank account. But are these social tokens the real you? Maybe the people we create on internet social networks like Facebook and Twitter, our "profiles," are real. We throw them up on-line, initiate conversations, and await people's replies. We create profiles, often with different descriptions, using different accounts and avatars. But is any social networking profile the real you? As mandatory social documents increase exponentially and are "shared" electronically at the speed of the internet, there may be no record of the real you. In the posted information, there is no consistent volitional person who has followed relentlessly a path that is uniquely your own. There is a collection of now digitalized information representing your life. The only personal information of real value, however, is in stories that we tell each other. After the telling of each story, we must wait for someone to reply with love. Is your loved one loving the real you? Our personal stories are artificial, but they do not have the power to change lives. Young people are particularly vulnerable to the stories of others. Elders want the young to live planned lives following set paths with the idea that identity is constant, dignified. As we mature, however, we learn that our memories are fragmented and there is no returning to our remembered "former selves." We are constantly changing, and yet we continue on. Perhaps we become possessed by spirits (past, present, and future) without even knowing it. Who is inside of me? Await your reply is one of the best novels I have read in many years. It was exciting, suspenseful, and opened doors to new insight. I believe Dan Chaon has written a novel for our current time that is like great turn of the century works of the past. He demonstrated in his fin de siècle novel that the end of an era is the beginning of a new one; the sundering of one constructed self is the beginning of a new identity. We can be anyone we want with developmental time irrelevant. Does the new identity carry us forward? Toward what?

[josephking6602 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit jumbled….characters all blended together after a while

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Recommended by Andy. Entertaining and disturbing. My e-book edition has an interview with the author at the end where he states that he didn't really plan the relationships in this book, they just developed. I find this disturbing as well - but I'm not sure why.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Adult fiction. 3 stories about changing identities intertwine, three stories I couldn't care less about. This book has received great reviews, but I just couldn't get into it.

[katybee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Impossible for me to put down. A twisted, intriguing mystery.

[carmenmilligan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was given to me with the comment "This book was disturbingly weird". No other recommendation would entice me to drop everything the read it! haha

Very nicely written. There are crossroads, turns, twists, and intersections in the story that are well done and not confusing in the least. As I read the stories of these three people, I tucked little items away in my mind until they started to swirl and come together, untangling in the most intriguing way.

The stories go back and forth between characters, and back and forth in time. The reader doesn't really see the path of the three until the end of the book, when the last piece is in place, you put the book down, step back and see the big picture. It was very different from anything else I have read lately, and I will definitely read more by this author.

Recommended.

[gmmartz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dan Chaon's 'Await Your Reply' is a book that's so good, so intricately plotted, yet so hard to describe.... 3 stories are interwoven, bouncing back and forth in time, addressing topics like identity, family, time, survival, death- an almost endless number of themes. The overarching feel to me was almost claustrophobic, with a layer of doom hanging over the top of it all. Some people are who they seem to be, others don't want to be who they are, and several just bring the concept of identity to a very fluid state. It'd be very easy to play spoiler here, so I'll resist going any further into the plot.Await Your Reply is my 2nd Chaon novel and I am totally enjoying his writing technique and stories. The novels don't seem to proceed in a linear fashion, yet they fit together seamlessly in the end. I try to picture how a writer could approach the task of pulling together multiple stories that bounce around independently on a timeline and can only imagine the difficulty. I've seen a few negative reviews that have considered this book 'boring', and all I can say is that it's one you have to concentrate on simply to keep characters and time straight and, if you do, you'll be rewarded in the end. This, as was his latest novel 'Ill Will', is a downer of a read but very rewarding if you like a mystery with a lot of layers that'll challenge you along the way.

[coolmama_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[erickibler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Just read it.

Don't let anyone tell you what it's about, not even a little bit. If you are at all a perceptive reader with an innate sense of story, any type of description may bungle it for you. Don't read the jacket copy. Don't read any reviews. If someone starts telling you about it, cover your ears and go, "Lalalalalalalala! I'm not listening!" If you order it from amazon, intentionally blur your eyes so you don't see any descriptive blurbs. Don't read any spoilers.


*S*P*O*I*L*E*R W*A*R*N*I*N*G






Aren't you listening? I said don't read any spoilers! Maybe you don't deserve to read this book!

Seriously, this could have been a five-star read for me, but I think I was told too much.

[octoberdad · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Satisfyingly unsatisfactory... That was the first phrase that came to mind when I finished reading the last page.

It's well-written and pretty well plotted. There's a clear "aha" point in the story--the only problem is that I figured out the "aha" well before what it seems the author intended. Despite the early epiphany, it was still rather enjoyable to read, given the author's easy tone and engaging manner.

I won't give any direct spoilers, but I'll just say that the title is apt. The story leaves you wanting. Which is a good thing.

[kvrfan9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When you want to tell everybody about the book you're reading, you know it's a good one. This book begins like a puzzle. Three different stories are told in alternating chapters. One focuses on a high school teacher who has run away with one of his students. Another is about a man searching for his twin brother, who may or may not be crazy. The third focuses on a man and his grown son who, when we first see them, have been made the victims of a horrible act of violence. While Dan Chaon writes a compellingly about all of them, the reader is left to wonder, "What connection do all these people have to one another?" When the puzzle pieces start coming together so that a picture emerges 3/4 of the way through the book, I was left to think about the author, "Oh, you clever boy!" Finally coming to the very last chapter, I found that Chaon surprised me again. Such a well-written, well-structured book! Certainly deserving of being a finalist for the National Book Award.

[coltfan18 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about three people with an unknown connection. Miles is looking for his missing twin brother. Lucy left town with her teacher to find money and is stranded in Nebraska. Jay left his family to be with birth father and run cons. Each chapter is told from either Mile's, Lucy's or Jay's point of view. While I read other books using this style, I didn't like it with this book. The ending has a surprising twist that answers most questions but still felt unfinished to me.

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting book with a really surprising ending, but I just couldn't connect with the characters like I have in other works by Chaon. Clever concepts, good writing, just not enough heart to it.

[ellenh_28 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fast. somewhat dark mystery. Enjoyed the writing, and kept me wondering right to the end. Still wondering about a couple of things.

[gwendydd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It might be a little unfair of me to only give this book 2 stars. It's always hard to tell whether to give stars based on how good a book is or how much I enjoyed it.... I didn't particularly enjoy this book, so it only gets 2 stars, but if I were rating its quality, it would probably get 3 or 4 stars.The book follows several characters who all seem to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, until about halfway through the book when you start to realize that each storyline has something to do with false identities, and eventually it is clear that identity theft ties all of the various storylines together.The gradual understanding of how the stories were tied together is pretty nifty... but the stories themselves are pretty awful. Not "awful" as in poorly conceived or poorly written, but "awful" as in none of the characters are even remotely likable and they're all pretty messed up and I really had trouble caring what happened to any of them.Mostly, the book felt like a 325-page setup for a 25-page joke, and by the time the punchline was revealed, I really didn't care and it felt trite.I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator was good.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extremely enjoyable, an impressive feat, at times it felt like a well written novel by Harlen Coben with slightly more emphasis on characters and less on plot. It begins with three apparently unrelated stories of people leaving their previous lives behind to set out to start a new one. And then the stories become increasingly intertwined as identity theft places an increasingly important role in all three stories. The story has an arc that grows increasingly suspenseful but then the point of the novel goes well beyond "figuring it out" -- which is all made nearly completely clear by about halfway through -- but instead the trajectory of the development of the characters, their back stories, and the exploration of the "ruin lifestyle" take over as the central source of interest. And even when it ends there is still a large web of improvisation just beyond the periphery of the novel that is left to the imagination.

[emilyingreen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great characters and a tense plot, with all the suspense of a thriller or true crime novel, but deftly written and richly described. It ended too quickly.

[con.rad · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Was a deeper exploration of what it means to have and lose an identity than I was expecting. Very interesting, and very thought provoking

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am confused … in a good way.Lucy has left her small Ohio town in the dead of night, along with her lover and former history teacher, on her way to adventure and riches; but can she really trust him? Miles has been searching for his missing, apparently schizophrenic, twin brother for years; a recent letter has given him a clue that dates back to their childhood and the fantasy games they played, and at last he is certain where to find him. Ryan has his own identity crisis when he learns that he was adopted; his biological father, Jay, is a ne’er-do-well who has never taken responsibility for anything, until he suddenly contacts Ryan, convinces him to come live with him, and learn his trade.At its core this is a novel about identity, and it is mesmerizing and intentionally confusing. You have three separate story lines, told in alternating chapters, and without any apparent connection between them, unless you think about identity and reinventing oneself as a connecting theme. I know that Ryan Schuyler is a real person. Lucy Lattimore is definitely a real person. Miles Cheshire and Lydia Barrie are real people. But what about Jay Kozelek, Hayden Cheshire, George Orson? The novel jumps around in time, making it even more difficult to keep track of all these characters. It starts about two-thirds of the way through the story line; or at least I think that’s where the opening falls in chronology. But don’t let that dissuade you; enjoy the roller coaster ride.

[mabroms-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Unlikely to stand as the definitive book about identity theft, but it had some interesting notions that make it a worthwhile read.

[micalhut · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'd give it a higher review if mental illness wasn't on my radar as anything but entertaining. Too dark for this period in my life. INCREDIBLE writing though. A great novel. Fleshed out characters. Looking forward to this author coming to Steamboat.

[heike6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was well written, but after I finished I was still waiting for it to start...

[bragan_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novel tells three stories in alternating chapters, each of which begins with a car ride: A young man, bleeding badly, is being rushed to a hospital through the rural woods of Michigan. A nineteen-year-old girl, having just recently graduated high school, is running off to Nebraska with her former high school history teacher. And another man is driving through Canada in search of his long-missing twin brother, who might or might be not schizophrenic. At first, none of these stories appear to have much of anything to do with each other, but it becomes more and more apparent as the novel goes on that they are intimately tied together...I enjoyed this a lot. It's got a corker of an opening, and it just keeps going from there, with the intriguing hints of connection between these three very different stories making for a puzzle whose answers creep up on you gradually in an interesting and satisfying way. It's also very well-written, with vivid characters and pages that just seem to fly by. If it weren't for annoying little things like sleep and work, I think I could easily have finished this in one sitting.

[raven9167 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have to admit, in spite of myself the ending of this book crept up on me. I could tell where one strand of the story was going, but I didn't see how it would all tie itself together. There were a few questions left unanswered here (what happened to Lucy?) and the descriptions were sometimes too lengthy, but overall I enjoyed Chaon's prose here and found several sections that really resonated with me, especially Ryan's story and Miles's yearning.