Book Review: Somebody Told Me by Danny Wallace

Somebody Told Me is a book by Danny Wallace. It was first published in hardback in May 2024 by Ebury, and the paperback followed in May 2025. This review is intended to be free of spoilers, but none of us are perfect. Consider yourself warned! A review copy was provided by the publisher. There are affiliate links at the end of this review.

Blurb

Have you been keeping your eye on your grandma lately? Have you been calling her enough? You sure she’s not spending too much time on YouTube? Is she talking fondly of dictators? Has she suddenly started quietly muttering in the Aldi queue about the “Jewish Space Lasers” she’s heard are setting wildfires around the world to make sure everyone believes in climate change? When was the moment the world began to believe anything?

Danny Wallace, million-copy bestselling author of Yes Man and Join Me, has fallen down the modern rabbit hole of lies, conspiracies and disinformation. Along the way, he encounters families torn apart by accusations and fake news, journalists putting themselves on the frontline of the disinformation war, reformed conspiracy theorists, influencers who see profit in stoking paranoia, and the shadowy nameless, faceless trolls on the other side of our screens. He discovers how disinformation and well-told lies can ruin a year or a whole life, how they can affect our family, our street, our community. How they can spread across a country, a continent, even the world. How they take hold of our imaginations and make us feel both helpless and powerful.

And Danny asks: can you do anything to stop it – even with the truth on your side?

Review

Danny Wallace’s Somebody Told Me is a sobering, often surreal descent into the rabbit hole of modern misinformation; part memoir, part cultural autopsy. It’s a far cry from the whimsical optimism of Yes Man or the eccentric camaraderie of my favourite Wallace book, Join Me, but Wallace’s trademark wit still flickers through the gloom. Here, he’s less the affable instigator and more the weary observer, tracing how conspiracy theories fracture families, warp communities, and weaponise loneliness.

Poignant, innit?

The book opens with a quiet gut-punch: Wallace sorting through his late father’s belongings and discovering a strange correspondence that hints at espionage, grief, and the porous boundaries between truth and fiction. From there, he interviews reformed conspiracy theorists, frontline journalists, and digital provocateurs, weaving their stories into a broader meditation on how belief itself has become a battleground. The tone is conversational, even pub-like at times, but the stakes are high. Wallace isn’t just documenting absurdities; he’s reckoning with their consequences.

This book doesn’t just chart the rise of conspiracy culture; it quietly interrogates the emotional architecture that makes such beliefs so seductive. One of the book’s deeper threads is grief: Wallace begins with the loss of his father, and from that personal rupture, he traces how people seek meaning in chaos, often turning to elaborate narratives when reality feels too fragmented to bear. The conspiracies he encounters aren’t just intellectual errors; they’re coping mechanisms, community substitutes, and identity scaffolds. Wallace’s tone is reflective, even elegiac, as he explores how misinformation thrives not just on ignorance, but on loneliness, disconnection, and the human need to feel seen. In this way, Somebody Told Me becomes less a polemic and more a quiet call to empathy. an invitation to understand before we condemn, and to rebuild trust in a world where truth itself feels endangered.

For readers who once embraced Wallace’s lighter work, this pivot may feel jarring. But there’s a maturity here, a sense that the world has changed and so must the storyteller. He doesn’t mock or dismiss; instead, he listens, reflects, and urges us to resist the seductive pull of algorithmic certainty. It’s not a perfect book—some threads fray, and the scope occasionally outpaces the depth—but it’s a timely one, and it reminds us that truth, like kindness, requires effort.

Rating: 3/5