Designed to Feel
Bestseller by Peter Burchardt
Designed to Feel
Your anxiety, jealousy, and anger aren't broken — they're ancient software running in a world they weren't built for. This book is the missing manual.
“The most eye-opening book on emotions I've ever read.”
Get It on Amazon →Available in paperback & Kindle
Nobody: An Odyssey book cover

A novel by Peter Burchardt

Nobody

An Odyssey

He dismantled the world’s largest surveillance network. Then he vanished. Eight years later, his son finds a trace — a single cryptocurrency transaction that shouldn’t exist.

“Tell me about a complicated man.”

Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson)

About the Book

Omar Reyes built the tools that dismantled the Trojan Grid — a surveillance network that monitored 800 million people across fourteen countries. When the operation succeeded, he was supposed to come home. Instead, he disappeared.

His wife Penny is told he’s dead. She doesn’t believe it. For eight years she fights a quiet war against the men circling her husband’s company — weaving legal complexity the way Homer’s Penelope wove her shroud, buying time she can’t justify and refuses to surrender.

Their son Tel, nineteen and fierce, traces a single cryptocurrency transaction to an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean. He searches for his father across three continents, from Nairobi to the Seychelles, driven by a conviction that everyone else calls grief.

And Omar — trapped on a billionaire’s private island, kept by a woman who calls it love — has spent seven years building an escape. His codename was NOBODY. And Nobody is coming home.

A modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in the age of algorithmic control, Nobody braids three journeys into a propulsive literary thriller about surveillance, freedom, and what it costs to find your way back to the people you love.

From the Pages

Tell me, O Algorithm, of that resourceful man who wandered far and wide after he destroyed the network that had enslaved half a continent.

Opening line

You can love someone and also be angry that they left. You can wait for someone and also think they're an idiot for going.

Destiny, age fifteen

I don't need you to be necessary. I need you to be chosen. Do you understand the difference?

Penny to Omar

Structure

1

Part One: Three Threads

12 chapters

Brooklyn. The island. Nairobi. Three timelines converge.

2

Part Two: The Gauntlet

12 chapters

Istanbul. The Bosphorus. Warsaw. The Atlantic. Every border a battle.

3

Part Three: Homecoming

9 chapters

The boardroom. The trial. The test. Coming home is harder than leaving.

4

Part Four: Coda

2 chapters

Twenty years later. A blue door. A granddaughter's question.

35 chapters • ~60,000 words • ~240 pages

Homer’s Story. Our Time.

The Odyssey endures because its central question endures: what are you willing to sacrifice to get back to the people you love? In our time, the monsters are digital. Calypso is a tech billionaire. The Lotus Eaters wear AR glasses. The Cyclops has one camera eye that sees everything. But the journey is the same. And the blue door is still waiting.

Penelope

Penny

Calypso

Kallie

Polyphemus

Poly

Telemachus

Tel

Circe

Dr. Kirke

Aeolus

Boran

The Lotus

Elysium

Nobody

Omar

For readers of

Madeline Miller's CirceAmor Towles's A Gentleman in MoscowEmily St. John MandelMichael ConnellyDonna Tartt

Come Home

Available now in eBook and paperback.

Order on Amazon

About the author

Peter Burchardt is the author of Designed to Feel, The Happiness Blueprint, Override, Hooked by Design, and The Tribe Manager— books on human nature, evolution, and how to live well as the animal you actually are. Nobody is his first novel. He is based in Dubai, UAE.

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