BODY DOUBLE – BODY DOUBLE
By Hanna Johansson
There, a young woman is working as a transcriber for a ghostwriter. Her rather lonely life is full of routines. She goes to the ghostwriter’s office, picks up cassette tapes with recorded material, drinks espresso and eats croissants on the way home, then sits down to write down what the unknown people say on the tapes. The ghostwriter then turns these stories into novels. One day she hears an anomaly: someone has recorded a message that could only be meant for her.
IN THE SAME town, Naomi and Laura meet by chance when they take each other’s coat in the café of the big department store. It’s a strange and intense encounter and soon Laura moves in with Naomi. As time goes by, Laura starts to look more and more like Naomi, gradually taking over Naomi’s life.
AT THE SAME time, the young woman who works for the ghostwriter realises that she is disappearing.
HANNA JOHANSSON’S SECOND novel Body Double is a surreal thriller about lies and truth, real and fake, what you hide and what you show.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Published by Norstedts, Sweden 2025
RIGHTS SOLD
Arabic, Ninawa for Publishing
Denmark, Frydenlund
France, Editions Robert Laffont
Germany, Secession Verlag
Spanish, La Pollera
Sweden, Norstedts
UK, Scribe
US, Catapult
REVIEWS
Hanna Johansson is Hitchcock-like… She puts her reader in a state of constant tension… Reading Body Double is like following a game of cups and balls with concentration, letting your eyes focus on the cup under which you think the ball is hiding… The dizzying uncertainty contributes to the strange atmosphere of a novel in which Hanna Johansson raises the stakes considerably and leads the reader into an intricately constructed hall of mirrors of exquisite prose.
– Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden
The first thing I want to do after finishing Hanna Johansson’s second novel Body Double is to read it again. […] But Hanna Johansson’s Body Double is not only a masterful novel in the footsteps of the film, it is a story about loneliness and about being created in someone else’s eyes. But also about what remains in the absence of that person.
– Aftonbladet, Sweden
Uncertainty is skilfully planted in me. Through concrete details and anonymity, Hanna Johansson creates an evocative mystery […] The novelist Hanna Johansson’s distinctive feature is the recording narrative. In restrained, choppy sentences, she writes out what is happening and how it relates […] The refined rendering contributes to the mystery. Even the very concrete can be incomprehensible.
– Dagens Nyheter, Sweden
BOOKS
Fiction
