Hanna Johansson

Body Double

A Novel

A young woman who works transcribing recordings for a ghostwriter begins to feel as if she's disappearing; meanwhile, two women who fall in love and move in together begin to resemble each other in this Hitchcockian literary thriller Naomi and Laura meet by chance at a department store café when Naomi mistakenly takes Laura’s coat. Following this first meeting, they keep bumping into each other, eventually forming a romantic relationship with Laura quickly moving in with Naomi. Laura tells Naomi little about her background, and appears to have no real life outside of their relationship—no friends, no work—but Naomi, having previously felt lonely despite her busy life, is content having someone waiting for her at home. As time goes by, Laura starts to change her appearance to resemble Naomi, and soon begins to take her place in the world. A parallel narrative follows a nameless woman working for a ghost writer, transcribing recordings of his clients recalling the events of their lives. Her weeks all look the same, and she moves in a predictable pattern between her home, the ghostwriter’s office, a café, a movie theatre, etc. After hearing something on a recording that appears to be addressed to her, however, she gets the sense that she is disappearing. From Hanna Johansson, the critically acclaimed author of Antiquity, this alluring and propulsive thriller, explores deception and authenticity, obsession, and the uncanny.

Antiquity

A Novel

Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson—a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo

On a Greek island rich with ancient beauty, a lonely woman in her thirties upends the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter. Lust and admiration for Helena, a chic older artist, brings Antiquity’s unnamed narrator to Ermoupoli, where Helena’s daughter, Olga, seems at first like an obstacle and a nuisance. But the unpredictable forces of ego and desire take over, leading our narrator down a more dangerous path, and causing the roles of lover and beloved, child and adult, stranger and intimate to become distorted. As the months go by, the fragile web connecting the three women nears rupture, and the ominous consequences of their entanglement loom just beyond a summer that must end.

With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, beauty, morality, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.