"Await Your Reply", (Ballantine Books. 324 pages. $25) by Dan Chaon: It's a loaded question: Who are you? The lies, delusions, carefully selected memories, ambitions and wary truths that can answer that question are the subject of Dan Chaon's new novel, "Await Your Reply".

Chaon slowly ties together the lives of three strangers: Miles is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, who taunts him with bizarre codes while staying just out of reach.

College sophomore Ryan discovers that he was adopted and, unmoored, starts life anew through fraudulent identities. Unhappy Lucy runs off with her high school history teacher to an abandoned motel at the edge of a dried-up Nebraska reservoir.

Their interconnected stories develop as Nigerian bank scam e-mails come to life. At first, there's an awkward invitation in the form of a letter, a phone call, just enough praise.

Lucy, Miles and Ryan know better than to reply, but each entertains the invitation long enough to become vulnerable to a subtle theft.

Pieces of their identities — documents, online search results, memories — are chipped away, scrambled and reassembled. On the surface each seems the same, but each is deeply corrupted.

Chaon doesn't rely on plot twists to reveal how Lucy, Miles and Ryan are linked, which would have ruined the meditative, purposeful pace he sets on the first page. As he picks apart each character in scenes filled with macabre disguises and sharp cutting instruments, Chaon is pondering a more chilling mystery: How could you be identified if just disjointed pieces remained? How much of yourself can you stand to lose?

"Await Your Reply" illuminates what it takes to maintain a true identity, on paper and in perception.