Coming on December 29, 2026 . . . the story of an aging world-class disinformation agent who finds himself imprisoned on fabricated charges. Using his talent for deception, he looks for a way out.

Meanwhile, he offers the secrets of his success to an investigative journalist, a member of the profession he spent his career duping. She agrees to listen, but she insists on a “David Copperfield beginning.” She wants the whole story.

So he tells her of his rural Virginia childhood, his entry into the business underworld of money laundering and rule-bending, his first marriage to the woman who served as a proxy for his own conscience, and how he learned to exploit the human need for stories. With the techniques he pioneered, future authoritarians may have no need to force compliance.

Through it all, a question looms over him: Has our technology outpaced our wisdom to manage it?

On Writing The Memoirs and True Confessions
of a Disinformation Agent

The plot for this novel jumped into my head while I was researching and writing A Firehose of Falsehood (Macmillan, 2024). My inspiration for the plot was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which is set during the Russian purges of the 1930s and tells the story of an aging Soviet revolutionary imprisoned by the regime he helped create. Unlike the story of the Soviet Revolution, our story is still unfolding. Therefore, I didn’t want anything like Koestler’s bleak ending.

I wrote a draft several years ago but felt dissatisfied with it, so it languished. Then, in late spring of 2026, I was invited to Madison, Wisconsin, to deliver a series of talks about A Firehose of Falsehood. I had learned much about our current information disruption since A Firehose of Falsehood was published, and I’d been watching in dismay as bad information continued to spread on both sides of the political spectrum.

During one of the talks in Madison, a member of the audience asked, “Do people want stories?” That question, along with what I’d learned since writing A Firehose of Falsehood, offered me a way to complete the novel.

Advance review copies (uncorrected proofs) are now available.