Instead of a hare with a pocket watch, it’s an enigmatic man with a proposition who leads our unnamed narrator down the rabbit hole. His offer is unusual, but lucrative: if she is willing to relinquish her identity entirely to work as a stand-in for a reclusive young actress until she is well enough to work again, she will be paid a small fortune. Since she has no family, no prospects, nothing to keep her in the holding pattern of her current life, she accepts. Her transformation–from an unknown and rather aimless person into a famous person whose entire existence is planned and commodified–is total and mesmerizing. As she is absorbed into her glossy new life, she begins to pick up on the subtle machinations all around her. Who is manipulating who? Against the sun-bleached beauty and decay of L.A., Emily Beyda uses her debut to explore the power imbalance of visibility versus surveillance and the startling mutability of personal identity. A hallucinatory journey through a mind warped and focused by obsession, The Body Double is a literary thriller with a philosophical bent!
–Lauren, Elliott Bay Book Company
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