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A surreal thriller that blurs the lines between lies and truth, between the selves we conceal and the faces we show the world.
As winter descends and the city fills with the scent of woodsmoke, a young transcriber follows the same routine each day. She collects tapes from a ghostwriter's office, stops for an espresso and croissant, and returns home to type out the voices of strangers – stories that will become someone else's novels. Her solitary life is predictable, unremarkable ... until the day she hears something different on the tapes- a message meant only for her.
Across the city, two women, Laura and Naomi, accidentally swap coats at a department store cafe. This brief encounter sparks something electric and strange, and soon, Laura has moved in with Naomi. As the days pass, she begins to mirror her more and more closely – her gestures, her habits, her very essence. Slowly, deliberately, Laura starts to take over Naomi's life.
Meanwhile, the transcriber makes a disturbing discovery- she is beginning to disappear ...
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Format
Paperback
Publisher
Scribe Publications
Country
Australia
Date
3 March 2026
Pages
226
ISBN
9781761381942
A surreal thriller that blurs the lines between lies and truth, between the selves we conceal and the faces we show the world.
As winter descends and the city fills with the scent of woodsmoke, a young transcriber follows the same routine each day. She collects tapes from a ghostwriter's office, stops for an espresso and croissant, and returns home to type out the voices of strangers – stories that will become someone else's novels. Her solitary life is predictable, unremarkable ... until the day she hears something different on the tapes- a message meant only for her.
Across the city, two women, Laura and Naomi, accidentally swap coats at a department store cafe. This brief encounter sparks something electric and strange, and soon, Laura has moved in with Naomi. As the days pass, she begins to mirror her more and more closely – her gestures, her habits, her very essence. Slowly, deliberately, Laura starts to take over Naomi's life.
Meanwhile, the transcriber makes a disturbing discovery- she is beginning to disappear ...
Emerging from the fog of an endless Nordic winter comes Body Double by Hanna Johansson, a surreal, intimate portrait of women, and the women they observe to, and beyond, the point of obsession.
In interlocking chapters, we meet three women: the transcriber, Laura and Naomi. The latter are two strangers brought together by the whims of chance and one mundane factor: their generic choice of coat. What begins as an awkward encounter becomes so much more – a different way to live in their own city, drawn closer together and pushed further apart like anxious magnets until they inevitably crash into an immediate intimacy that quickly devolves into something entirely different.
In the background to this eerie romance there is our unnamed transcriber, who acts as a conduit between her client – the ghostwriter – and his clients: wealthy women hiring a boutique biographer to tell their ‘Story of a Life’. These strangers’ stories wash through and over the transcriber, piquing her curiosity on occasion, more often blurring together. These vignettes rely on Johansson’s masterful abilities as a short-story writer, painting richly detailed miniature portraits of characters whose capacity for introspection is limited – a side effect of broadly comfortable lives. Until, suddenly, a tape whispers an eerie message just for her.
In some ways, Body Double is about how invisible many women feel, but it’s also about the danger of being over-observed – how being seen changes you and how it can so easily make you disappear. It’s also about how the choices of self-presentation and style affect not only how others see and perceive us, but how we see and perceive ourselves. This lush, introspective and slightly surreal novel would make for great book club discussions, especially for fans of The Coin and On the Calculation of Volume.
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