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In a fictional English university town in the near future lies Northwick Author Development Academy, an elite incubator for the creative class.

Its candidates arrive desperate to prove their originality, only to find that their work has converged into something eerily uniform.

As a contagious ‘twinning’ trend sweeps across the student body, the cohort find themselves trapped in a tightening web of surveillance and mythmaking. Watched constantly by the Academy’s hidden media unit, they begin to resemble copies of one another – twinned in fear, ambition, and aesthetic drift.

From award-winning poet Sam Riviere, Doppelgänger is fiction at its most clever, most engaging and most self-reflective. Both a scathing critique of contemporary culture and a virtuoso game of cat and mouse, Doppelgänger invites its reader on a quest with an uncertain outcome, guided always by Riviere’s wit, stylistic brilliance, and matchless mind.

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“A canny, cerebral work of hyperrealism . . . Beyond Riviere’s genius dismantling of capital C ‘Culture.’ there are also more general observations about society that you feel compelled to underline . . . He layers observation on observation, pairing the recursive rhythms of Thomas Bernhard with the social acuity of Ben Lerner. Often his paragraphs run to several pages but avoid disorientating the reader. Meanwhile, his winking character names—Patrick Fake, Isabella Final, Carl Sample—are enjoyably Pynchonesque. The danger with writing a book like Doppelgänger is that you end up perpetuating the very thing you’re warning against. But Riviere pulls it off; he has succeeded in making Doppelgänger undeniably singular.” —Matthew Janney, The Financial Times

Sam Riviere is the author of the poetry books 81 Austerities (2012), Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (2015), After Fame (2020) and Conflicted Copy (2024) as well as numerous limited-edition titles. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2009, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2012. Born in Norwich, he currently lives in London, where he runs the micropublisher If a Leaf Falls Press. His debut novel Dead Souls (2021) was published by W&N in the UK and Catapult in the US.