Doppelganger

A Trip into the Mirror World

By: Naomi Klein

Narrated by: Naomi Klein

Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all?

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity - all we have to meet the world - so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting 'the children'). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It's for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.

©2023 Naomi Klein (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

This book is as foreboding as a guide through the maze of mirrors of the modern right should be. But it's not only that: Naomi Klein has made Doppelganger gripping and scintillating, too. The result is a reckoning with the present moment that's as insightful as all Klein's indispensable work, and as suspenseful as a novel. (China Mieville)

Naomi Klein never disappoints. Doppelganger swirls through the bewildering ideas of the ultra-right that often appear as a distorted mirror of left struggle and strategy. With her always incisive analysis of the systems and structures linked to global capitalism, Klein now fiercely and brilliantly urges that our justice movements be prepared to follow the quest for new meaning into dimensions where we might least expect to find it: in injury and vulnerability. (Angela Y. Davis)

I finished this book and nearly cried with relief, Klein gave me the gift of being calm. She explores and diagnoses with empathy, warmth and searing precision the confusion and utter madness of what it is to be alive right now. This is a big book with big ideas which poses the most direct questions for our times. Everyone needs to read it as a matter of urgency. (Sheena Patel)

Genuinely brilliant book

An engaging story of the authors self exploration of concepts aligning “the others” and “us”. Frightening in parts as it’s clear that collectively we, the western world at least, is playing into the hands of those who have already secured wealth and power and seek to solidify it further by putting people against people, and not ideas.

A fresh way to look at the world right now

While Klein’s politics don’t exactly line up with my own, I was genuinely impressed and fascinated at her take on modern politics and shifts in the far right and the “far out” in this brilliant book. It’s so impressive to be able to step back when we’re all so buried in this world and this way of being, and to see it with fresh eyes. I also love the incredibly humanist and loving/caring take she brings to it all - this is not a book that just obliterates the nut-jobs (although she does put them in their place from time to time!) - there is compassion throughout.

Klein never disappoints

An insightful and crucially important look at the present moment. I want to give this book to everyone I know.