The Double

A beautiful new edition of Dostoevsky's timeless classic

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the original. As he is increasingly persecuted, Golyadkin finds his social, romantic and professional life unravelling, in a spiral that leads to a catastrophic denouement.

The Double, Dostoevsky's second published work of fiction, which foreshadows in its themes many of his mature novels, is the surreal and hallucinatory tale of an unfortu - nate anti-hero, at once chilling in its depiction of the dark sides of human nature and exuberantly comical.

'The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.' - Albert Camus

'The most impressive thing about The Double is how pertinent it feels today... like all the best fiction, The Double reinvents and rewrites itself for the current age' - Jeremy Dyson