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One Story

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TRAILBLAZER. VISIONARY. ICON. CRIMINAL?
 
In the sun-drenched chaos of 2010s Silicon Valley, a tech company's meteoric rise culminates in a devastating fall. Dot Van Jensen, the trailblazing CEO-turned-fugitive, narrates her story from a hidden corner of Indonesia. A scandal has painted her as the villain, a puppet-master who fractured democracy and paved the way for a darker future. But is the truth as cut and dry as the headlines seem to imply?
 
While Dot weaves a tale of One Story's genesis, her co-founders—her son, Jon, whose formative years saw him sheltered from technology on a secluded ranch, and Rae, the enigmatic partner who saw in Dot a path to power—grapple with their own legacies.
 
As a documentary crew digs for the truth, a chorus of over a thousand voices, the company's employees, fill the pages with their own narratives. They always believed the work they were doing was putting them on the right side of history, and they’re not going to let it be told any other way. If anyone is going to take the fall, it’s going to be Dot, and if she won’t fall, there are plenty who will push her.
 
One Story is a captivating look at ambition, betrayal, and the power of narrative in a world hungry for answers. It's a story where the lines between hero and villain are blurred, and the true cost of progress becomes a question mark shimmering in the California sun.

PRAISE FOR ONE STORY :‘a captivating exploration of ambition, power and progress.’  Fashion Journal

‘smart, funny and genuinely unique’ – Anna Kate Blair, author of The Modern

'I loved this book so much.' – Jane Flett, author of Freakslaw

'So funny, so weird, so joyfully cynical and blisteringly smart.' – Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, authors of Feast While You Can

PRAISE FOR SAD GIRL NOVEL :‘a stroke of genius’  –  Diana Reid, author of  Love & Virtue  and  Seeing Other People ‘wildly amusing, sharply relevant’  – The Australian ‘extremely relatable’  – Sydney Morning Herald ‘Brilliant.’  – Daily Mail UK ‘Pip Finkemeyer has drawn such a unique, funny and painfully astute character in Kim. I could keep reading her inner monologue forever. It is rare to pick up a novel so simultaneously hilarious and moving. I loved it.’  –  Laura Kay, author of  Wild Things  and  Tell Me Everything ‘Relatable AF.’  – Pedestrian.

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 30, 2025

7 people are currently reading
163 people want to read

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Pip Finkemeyer

2 books16 followers

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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
Profile Image for Rebecca.
535 reviews811 followers
October 17, 2025
“Every story wants to be the only one that matters — that’s how the trouble starts.”

Pip Finkemeyer’s One Story is sharp, funny, and eerily believable in that “I could totally see this happening in real life” kind of way. It follows Dot Van Jensen, a once revered tech CEO who creates a storytelling platform meant to unite the world, until it all collapses spectacularly.

I loved how Finkemeyer plays with ideas of power, truth, and who gets to control the narrative. Dot is complex, visionary one moment, deeply flawed the next and you never quite know if you should admire her or side eye her. The multi voice format gives every perspective a chance to shine (and contradict), and it’s wild how the story shifts depending on who’s telling it.

One Story takes aim at our obsession with innovation and image, but it never forgets the human mess underneath it all. I closed the book both impressed and slightly unnerved… which, honestly, is the best kind of ending.

I Highly Recommend!

Thank you Ultimo Press for my early readers copy.

Awvailable Now!
Profile Image for Sheree | Keeping Up With The Penguins.
720 reviews174 followers
October 18, 2025
I’ll admit that One Story is a bit hard to unpick. It’s very smart, very ominous, very funny, but also a little perplexing at times. I can’t help but feel like some aspects of the story went over my head. Still, it was worth a read for the laughs and the moments of scary insight into the apps that dominate our lives.

My full review of One Story is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
Profile Image for nina.reads.books.
669 reviews34 followers
October 9, 2025
Pip Finkemeyer’s first book was Sad Girl Novel which was an intellectual, semi-serious takedown of the ubiquitous sad girl narrator. In One Story she pokes at Silicon Valley tech companies and the rise of apps that mine personal data.

The main narrator is Dot Van Jensen a rich and enigmatic CEO of One Story a platform that tells its users a story each day about the world. After a meteoric rise as a scandal around data emerges, Dot goes on the run as the world makes her out to be a villain. With her co-founders – her son Jon and Rae, Dot’s friend/lover – seemingly turning on her they each begin to grapple with their role in the company and what this means for the future.

The points of view are interspersed with chapters from One Story’s hundreds of employees in a Greek chorus style, which by the way is one of my most favourite unexpected narrative styles. All the voices begin to contradict and undermine each other.

One Story combines themes of power and ambition and considers who controls the narrative in a world of technology and social media. A book about Silicone Valley could have been a bit eyerollingly boring but I found it a bit of a page turner. Pip Finkemeyer has a sharp eye and a way of delivering biting commentary with a humorous tone.

The ending unfortunately fell a bit flat for me though. It was kind of abrupt and unclear which didn't leave me satisfied. But overall, One Story was clever and original and I did enjoy it.

Thank you @ultimopress for my #gifted copy.
Profile Image for Craig and Phil.
2,248 reviews135 followers
November 28, 2025
Big thanks to Ultimo Press for sending us a copy to read and review.
Silicon Valley is synonymous with technological advancement and an IT crowd.
The spine of new apps that absorb personal information and those that sit on the social media platform.
Meet Dot and enjoy her quirks.
Dot narrates for the most part and it shows her as a visionary and complex character.
At times she was flawed and a little untrustworthy.
A story that reveals how addicted we are to new technology and devices.
But like any job where people work there is underlying messy issues between employees.
The narrative changed depending on whose point of view was telling the story.
It was a very well written and clever, for the most part.
I enjoyed the humour that was interlaced especially a comment about crocs and in a few years everyone will be wearing them.
Profile Image for Kimmy C.
607 reviews9 followers
December 28, 2025
Given a solid 3.75, as there were times I was ambivalent towards the story and the characters, and then in places it seemed to get a bit too clever for itself. However, if you have read Brave New World (is it a utopia or a dystopia??), and have a bit of knowledge of history of the internet and its role in our lives, then you’ll get the references. Dot, on the run from a scandal at her tech company, gives us the story from the start of the startup, and then the events that lead her to be where she is. Touching on the internet’s ability to influence things, the all-in dedication expected of the tech workers, and the relationships between mother and son (and everything in between), this will likely cause you to cast a cynical eye over all things online, and the people who brought them to us.
Profile Image for Gavan.
704 reviews21 followers
November 7, 2025
Fantastic read - compelling plot; well crafted (loved the structure of different perspectives); brilliant concept. It confirmed all my worst assumptions about tech bro billionaires. And the concept of the One Story app is so appealing - synthesise everything for me into "one story" each day so I don't spend several hours each day on various media catching up with the world. Just a shame about the underlying data capture required & the loose ethics of the sector in the current political environment. Loved the suspense of what was the crisis that caused Dot to flee; loved the (slightly) open ending.
Profile Image for Megan.
708 reviews7 followers
November 4, 2025
4.5 stars
There were times I wasn’t sure but gee I really loved this book. It’s smart. There are spots where there is a little too much exposition but overall it’s such an important deep story about big tech and information that is totally let down by its cover design.

My fave word of 2024 was Enshittification (followed closely by The Enshitternet 🛜). The Macquarie Dictionary wisely made it Word of the Year.

These words coined by Cory Doctorow author of the book by the same name are just the perfect way to describe what happens to pretty much all of our favourite tech.

So along comes ONE STORY set in 2010s Silicon Valley tech world and I just had to get a copy (thanks @ultimopress ❤️).

Don’t be fooled by that cover, this is a smart sassy snarky novel centred on the tech industry ft. a charismatic founder and a treasure trove of morally complicated characters.

This is the rise and fall of a fictional tech company. There’s Dot van Jensen an Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos) style character who is full of sass and insanity in equal measure, her friend Rae (partner? Business or otherwise?) and her son Jon (named after John Savage from Brave New World).

It’s about power, blurred lines between heroes and villains and how our tech starts with humanity in mind before it enshittifies.

It’s the story of right now.

I loved the POV character voices - are they good or evil and you can’t go past the excellent chorus. Love a chorus in a book.

I was less convinced by some of the exposition and manifesto elements of the story but on balance I loved this.

And it convinced me to buy a copy of BRAVE NEW WORLD, so there’s that. And if you want a great nonfiction read, grab Cory’s 2025 release Enshittification.

Recommended for the tech curious and the tech furious 🤬.
Profile Image for Marles Henry.
950 reviews58 followers
October 24, 2025
One Story is an interesting, almost comical fable about delusions of grandeur and the trust we place in technology. The novel follows Dot Van Jensen, a disgraced Silicon Valley CEO hiding on a remote Indonesian island as a documentary crew reconstruct her fall from grace. Through Dot’s unreliable narration, Big Tech, algorithms and coding are explored, as well as how its leaders rewrite realities, sell social salvation, and turn your own personal data into a destiny you’re going to be longing for.

Beneath the satire, all the IT despots and the manipulation of social media was a very important question: who really controls our story? Is it the creators or the algorithm? This book has a sharp writing style that highlighted a dichotomy: how technology feeds on prediction and replication, versus how fiction thrives on contradiction, imagination, mystery, and moral ambiguity. Dot’s world of apps and analytics is one where every user becomes complicit by clicking “accept,” and cleverly, this story itself becomes an act of resistance to it all. Could a machine tell this story if it was not created from her data? This is where the power triangle between Dot, her son Jon, and business partner/part time lover Rae is tested to its core. Where are the loyalties – in code or within human emotion?

This was also a cautionary story against our blind faith in artificial intelligence. We blindly accepted social media and look where it took us. Have we really been enlightened by the experiences we have through social media? It's dulled our senses to really understand how detrimental AI and algorithms may be. This is the cleverness of this book: literature and the writing of books is subjective and comes from emotion and maintains individuality. Big data may know our habits, our likes, our click patterns: hopefully it will never learn how our hearts operate; so far, only stories can do that.

Thank you #ultimopress for the #gifted copy.
616 reviews
December 3, 2025
.....📚 𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝑹𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘 📚.....

One Story by Pip Finkemeyer is a sharp, satirical take on Silicon Valley ambition and collapse, blending tech-industry mythmaking with human vulnerability. It’s a novel that asks how far idealism can stretch before it snaps and is both entertaining and unsettling in its reflections.

In the turbulent world of 2010s Silicon Valley, One Story traces the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of a tech company built on the promise of reshaping news. At its center is Dot Van Jensen, a visionary CEO turned fugitive, accused of manipulating democracy and steering society toward a darker future.
From her exile in Indonesia, Dot recounts the company’s origins alongside her co-founders: Jon, her son raised in isolation from technology, and Rae, the ambitious partner who saw Dot as a gateway to power. Their intertwined legacies unfold against the backdrop of a documentary investigation, where employees—over a thousand strong—insist on telling their own version of events.
What emerges is a fractured chorus of ambition, betrayal, and self-preservation. Everyone believes they were on the right side of history, but if blame must be assigned, Dot is the one they’re determined to see fall.

Having worked in tech herself, Finkemeyer brings a ring of truth to the surreal narrative, grounding it in recognizable details of startup culture. The novel doesn’t just critique tech; it interrogates how ambition, betrayal, and idealism ripple through personal lives. The documentary-style structure, while clever, can feel disjointed. Dot’s fugitive narration is intriguing but sometimes keeps the reader at arm’s length, making it harder to fully invest in her downfall. Overall, I'd say this one is ambitious and biting but not always warm. Perfect for readers who love their fiction with a side of cultural commentary.
Profile Image for peculiarly_bookish.
14 reviews2 followers
Read
December 9, 2025
Thank you Ultimo Press for the gifted copy of One Story by Pip Finkemeyer. This review can also be found on my bookstagram.

A novel that is relevant to the current world with it's themes of power, ambition, unity, division, and control. Especially as our main character in this book Dot is a CEO, however in saying this Dot is a character made up with layers.

The world has already created it's veiw and understanding, that Dot is the villian in everyone's story. However I enjoyed how her character was written, and developed as she is flawed and human yet at times she does have redeemable qualities. However for me as a reader this is why I liked her character, as she wasn't a straight laced good character.

This is one of those reads that explores many different topics throughout in regards to technology and AI. Especially how it's used in everyday life, and the various consequences of it's use. I honestly found this to be a interesting take on all these various themes. Especially when you look beyond the writing style. As this was definitely a novel that can be said to be, a look into what happens when hope is placed in AI technology.

Overall I found this to be a different and interesting read, that can also be seen as a book that can create further discussion in regards to AI.  However I'm undecided on what I think regarding the ending of this narrative.

If your a reader who enjoys contemporary fiction or, reads focusing on current issues. I'd recommend adding One Story to your TBR and or shelves.
Profile Image for ameliastacey.
145 reviews
January 13, 2026
3.5? misuse of data by tech companies and complex dynamics between the three founders given their personal ties seemed quite interesting on the surface and were enough to keep me reading, although i didn’t find myself that convinced by dot and her many unnamed successful tech ideas, the one story app becoming that popular (seems far-fetched that it would last any longer than be-real in maintaining any cultural relevancy), and i strongly disliked the ending. super unsatisfying and felt kind of lazy. the characterisation didn’t really feel like it supported that ending and it cut you away from main characters and never returned to their perspectives after taking a sharp turn away from the characterisation that seemed to have been building throughout the book. the way this book referenced brave new world many times did make me want to read it - wonder if the book and the ending made more sense knowing how bnw plays out?
Profile Image for Jay Dwight.
1,096 reviews41 followers
October 20, 2025
Dot Van Jensen creates a story telling platform meant to unite the world, but it all collapses spectacularly.

Multiple timelines, multiple narrators giving their perspective. And we get massive differences in the story depending who's telling it.

Themes of truth, power and controlling the narrative which is all too real in our modern social media world.
Profile Image for G Batts.
143 reviews7 followers
October 27, 2025
I’m not a fan of Huxley so it’s not a surprise that I struggled with this book. Like Huxley’s writing, One Story is mostly large chunks of opinion pieces held together with a basic semblance of a plot.

Finkemeyer sticks the ending though 🤸
Profile Image for CS Lee.
1 review
December 17, 2025
Finkemeyer, with this 'One Story', has drilled deep into the zeitgeist and crafted a story so beautiful and relevant and ORIGINAL it feels like she lived it.

I hated the end because I didn’t want it to end.
And how good is the cover? Hardcore recommend.
225 reviews4 followers
December 3, 2025
Clever and insightful but not entirely likeable. overdone and tiresome in many places - the story was a rewrite of very old news. Barely fiction.
Profile Image for Suz.
1,561 reviews866 followers
November 7, 2025
One Story is a very tech-aware novel, and the author’s acknowledgement revealing a background in app development and tech companies helped everything click into place, even if that context came a tiny bit late for me. The story is unusual and explores the insidious nature of technology, how information is gathered and delivered, and how manipulative and messy that process can be. Narrated by a disgraced founder who has worked her way up from nothing and is now in hiding, alongside other voices like her tech-sheltered son and her on-again-off-again lover, who has a dark, backhanded way all of her own. There is also a collective voice through journalists interviewing employees, each with their own conflicted feelings about their work and their boss. The book asks who gets to control the narrative in a world shaped by social media and the technologies that drive it. It is a strange and ambitious novel that rewards the curious, open-minded reader. While the many voices, dark comedy, and layered ideas were not entirely my usual preference, I was genuinely intrigued by the creative vision behind it. This is a wholly original piece of work that is remarkably well written. It will find its niche, and I admire its boldness. Who doesn’t appreciate a distinct voice that dares to stand apart?

Thank you to Ultimo for the review copy and for supporting strong Australian voices, and sorry to review so late after reading, so much going on in my little part of the world!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews

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