Doubles: A Novel - Softcover

This remarkable novel is both a thriller about other selves and an excursion through post-war artistic bohemias. The narrator endures a series of often surreal misadventures in search of a lost love in Italy, Greece and Iceland, as well as Paris and Oxford. He is pursued by himself, through a world in which almost everything seems to double. In the foreground of his journey lies a discussion of painting, and of what it is like to paint, in terms you will not find elsewhere. Tricking you into its Kafkaesque finale, the novel shows the late modernist era at the mercy of a fractured psyche.

Christopher Neve was born in 1942. He is a painter who has written and taught on art extensively. His Unquiet Landscape (Faber) was recommended as a book of the year by both The Financial Times and The Observer. This novel is a masked anti-biography in which all the characters are fictitious except for one.