Ever get the feeling your search engine knows your question – and its answer – before you’ve started to type? Student and serial liar Dillon Deckardas knows just how you feel, and so do his alter egos Dylan (who runs a tech startup) and Dhilan (who cares for his ill mother).

Deckardas’s multiple online profiles, each with their own passwords and conversational registers, are an attempt to control a life adrift. He’s always on the move, downing Red Bull, spinning stories and trying to second-guess the world. When two men start following him, asking questions about his startup, Deckardas’s millennial tremors coalesce into a frantic quest for something real.

Malkani’s follow- up to the ambitious Londonstani packs in some lively neologisms (tears are “eye-saliva”), and combines a hard-hitting account of the stresses felt by young carers with some sharp points about truth and value in the digital age.

Unfortunately, the supporting cast don’t have any real life to them, and parts of Distortion are repetitive or just plain dull, as ideas or scenarios are played and replayed. Digital dependency may be at its heart, but this intriguing, messy novel is a little too easy to put down.

• Distortion by Gautam Malkani is published by Unbound (RRP £9.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.