Seven online influencers in fiction

Charlotte Duckworth is a graduate of the Faber Academy’s acclaimed six-month ‘Writing a Novel’ course. She started her career working as an interiors and lifestyle journalist, writing for a wide range of consumer magazines and websites.

Alongside writing, she now runs her own website design studio.

Duckworth's debut novel, The Rival, was published in September 2018. Her second novel, Unfollow Me, is out now in the US from Crooked Lane Books.

At CrimeReads, Duckworth tagged seven top books featuring vloggers, social media personalities, and their (occasionally obsessive) fans. One title on the list:

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

Possibly one of the first novels to explore the divide between virtual and actual reality, Kiss Me First was released in 2014. It tells the story of Leila, who offers to impersonate vivacious and fragile Tess—a woman in her late 30s with mental health issues who wants to ‘disappear’ from life and all social connections. But can someone else truly take over our lives, even just online? We know the proposition is a bad one from the outset, but this gripping read takes us further into the dark than you could ever imagine.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue