Dan Chaon stood in a typical Nebraska heat, looking out onto the lake bed. It seemed abandoned or forgotten, dried sand blowing through the patches of scrub. It was the same place Chaon spent his childhood, molding his identity.

“This has to be in the book,” he remembers thinking.

The book is Await Your Reply, Chaon’s fourth novel, from which he will read at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., at 7 p.m. today.

Chaon said he wanted to explore what the concept of identity means through his characters in this latest work.

“It is trying to engage with really important questions about identity and who we are in the modern, digital age,” he said. “I was really interested in the way that identity is changing in contemporary society and in some ways it’s becoming more fluid for people to change themselves and become different people.”

So the novel does just that. It follows three characters struggling to find themselves. It begins with Ryan, an Iowan and college flunk-out who works with his estranged father in an identity-theft credit-card scam.

The story then moves to a young woman, Lucy, who decides to leave her hometown with her high-school history teacher. She eventually ends up in a hotel somewhere in Nebraska and becomes suspicious of the man she has run off with.

The last character in the novel is Miles, who has been searching for his missing twin brother for 10 years.

But the characters’ story lines aren’t as disjointed as they may seem.

“All these characters are involved in shady business, and over the course of the book, you come to see that they are connected,” Chaon said.

With this novel, he wanted to move away from the more traditional, family drama that his past writing has focused on and try to work with different genres.

“Part of this particular book was working with elements of psychological suspense and thriller,” he said. “Stuff that I really liked as a kid.”

He’s excited to share these elements with the Iowa City community, he said. He looks forward to the reading at Prairie Lights, remembering reading his first published work at the bookstore in 2004.

“Because the University of Iowa has a very strong literary background, you get a really nice audience,” he said. “It is really just one of the great bookstores to read at.”

Jan Weissmiller, a co-owner of Prairie Lights, is equally eager for the reading.

“It’s going to be an event, because Elizabeth McCracken from the Writers’ Workshop is going to introduce him,” she said. McCracken, who wrote Niagara Falls All Over Again, teaches at the Workshop.

Weissmiller expects a big crowd for the reading, which will be followed by a question-and-answer period.