The Bottom Line: Voted the Year’s Best Psychological Thriller in the 2025 BestThrillers.com Book Awards.
Author Alexandra Pugachevsky brilliantly leans into contemporary AI fears and transforms them into a story that is not only wildly entertaining, but also believable.
I, Rodion succeeds in part because of how well Pugachevsky defined and developed the book’s primary voice.
More importantly, it captures the anxiety of a world where our identities can be copied, manipulated, and ultimately used against us.
The book relays the haunting journey of eighteen year old Rodion Likharev, a Russian immigrant trying to rebuild his life in Pittsburgh.
When he accepts a lucrative position at a secretive AI research lab, he believes he has finally found his way out of hardship.
His assignment appears straightforward: interact with his digital twin, an AI duplicate engineered to mirror him flawlessly.
Yet the job that seems like salvation quickly becomes a psychological descent into uncertainty.
Pugachevsky fuses cutting edge speculation with emotional rawness, crafting a thriller that interrogates consciousness and the limits of free will without sacrificing pace or suspense.
