Await Your Reply

Await Your Reply is a novel by the American writer Dan Chaon, published in 2009. It follows three sets of characters whose lives turn out to be connected, and the connecting material is identity: the book is about people who take on other people's names and histories.

Miles Cheshire has spent ten years searching for his twin brother, who keeps appearing in the records of different places and then vanishing again. In another strand a young man learns that his identity is not what he was told, while elsewhere a teacher and her student are drawn into a scheme built on forged documents and drained accounts. The novel keeps the three stories apart for a long time and then lets the reader see how they fit together.

Chaon writes a literary thriller with a sharp interest in what an identity is worth, and the structure is part of the suspense. It was one of his best-received novels and is often described as a book about the internet as much as about fraud.