Snakeskin: a novel
Who hasn’t wondered what life might be like if, just for a day, you could be somebody else?
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Philip Croft -Berri, a man with a mundane office job, is selected by elements within the security services to give up his life in London and take on another, indefinitely, at the opposite end of the country.
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He has no choice. He is told it is his patriotic duty.
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“An identity gift rather than identity theft, as it were.”
So begins a conspiracy thriller in which Philip attempts to chart a path through a dangerous maze of ambiguity. Will he ever get his old life back? Does he even want to? And are the people who line up to help him in Cumbria, North London and the South of France all they seem to be?
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Snakeskin presents an eleven-year span of contemporary Britain, offering a chilling vision that is little more than one degree askew from reality.
Identity theft, remote surveillance, suspicious characters at every turn… these are some of the elements running through Snakeskin, a novel that has been almost a dozen years in the making.
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I began writing an unpublished version of Snakeskin in 2013. Back around that time the American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden had become notorious for leaking classified documents relating to the existence of global surveillance programmes. Similarly, the media organisation Wikileaks had been shining a light on human rights violations exercised by various national governments. Meanwhile the growing use of cyber information-gathering in the new digital age was bringing with it a dramatic rise in incidents of identity theft – from the corporate to the personal. These unnerving elements created the background noise as I put together ideas for a story of a man trapped in the middle of a very 21st century web.
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Snakeskin gave me the chance to write about the Lake District, a favourite part of Britain, but the first version did not really conform to a full-length novel and the ending was deliberately ambiguous. In spite of its limited exposure, at the time I was perfectly happy with it as a project fulfilled.
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However, from the autumn of 2024 and over the winter and spring of 2025, I revisited the story, polishing it, extending its range and giving it a more satisfying ending. I also wanted to bring it up to date, and reference events in Britain’s more recent past such as Brexit and the Covid19 pandemic. It doubled in length, spent some time in the South of France and became a fully-fledged novel in five parts with the themes of identity and self-perception at its heart.