The Secret Life
The Secret Life is a book about identity, secrecy, surveillance and the relationship between the individual, the state and technology at a time when information and data has become the de facto currency of Late Capitalism. It is structured in three long essays, versions of which have appeared in the London Review of Books.Through Julian Assange, Satashi Nakamoto – the much mythologised founder of Bitcoin – and Ronald Pinn, an identity constructed by O’Hagan himself, what emerges in The Secret Life is a uniquely intelligent book about the criminal mind and collective responsibility in the twenty-first century.
‘the best and most finely nuanced journalistic profile that this reviewer has read this century.’
Andrew Anthony, The Guardian
The Atlantic Ocean
As he grew up, Andrew O’Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids. This collection of essays tells the story of that period in our cultural and political life. Through the reported essays that first made O’Hagan’s name, it’s a book filled both with personal story and the power of documentary witness. Opening with a major personal piece examining the journey of Britain and America since the closing of the Thatcher years, it concludes with a piece of reportage telling the story of a British and an American soldier who died in Iraq on the same day in 2006. A fascinating, important and timely collection from a hugely important essayist.
‘The best essayist of his generation.’
New York Times
A Night Out With Robert Burns
The Scottish poet Robert Burns has been idolised and eulogised. He has been sainted, painted, tarted up and toasted. He is famous as the author of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and he has long since become the patron saint of the heart-sore and the hung-over. But what about the poems? Beneath the cult of Burns’ Nights and patriotic yawps, there is the work itself, among the purest and most truthful created in any age. This is a Burns collection like no other: a reader’s edition, made for the pleasure of reading. Novelist and Scottish essayist Andrew O’Hagan comes into company with the poet who has mattered most to him in his writing life. He selects the poems for the reader, and converses with the work, offering fragments and distilled commentary of his own. The effect is explosive, giving us Robert Burns at his very best – a political Burns, a poet who can name hypocrisy and intolerance, and point directly to the human heart.
The Missing
One of the most original, moving and beautifully written non-fiction works of recent years, The Missing marked the acclaimed debut of one of Britain’s most astute and important writers.
In a brilliant merging of reportage, social history and memoir, Andrew O’Hagan clears a devastating path from the bygone Glasgow of the 1970s to the grim secrets of Gloucester in the mid 1990s.
‘A triumph in words.’ Independent on Sunday
‘The Missing, part autobiography, part old-fashioned pavement-pounding, marks the most auspicious debut by a British writer for some time.’ Gordon Burn, Independent
‘A timely corrective to the idea that nothing profound can be said about now.’ Will Self, Observer Books of the Year
‘His vision of modern Britain has the quality of a poetic myth, with himself as Bunyan’s questing Christian and the missing as Dantesque souls in limbo.’ Blake Morrison, Guardian
