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
First 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
[Johansson] writes the eerie thriller atmosphere very skilfully and engagingly. Here, every little detail, however insignificant it may seem, sooner or later puts everything at stake. The novel is imbued with a film aesthetic, particularly nineties horror, but also with a Paul Austerian urban environment of oppressive claustrophobia and paranoia, together with a voyeurism derived from Hitchcock. Just like the characters in the novel, I as a reader am forced to look over my shoulder and question what is real.
– Sydsvenskan
The first thing I want to do after finishing Hanna Johansson’s second novel is to read it again. […] 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
An incredibly successful thriller in the spirit of Hitchcock. […] Stylistically, Johansson works with repetition, displacement, confusion, and resolution. A coat temporarily changes hands – and everything is thrown into turmoil. It is incredibly well done from beginning to end.
– Göteborgs-Posten
It is skilfully executed, the kind of work of art that you admire from half a meter away and think I will never be that good. But it is precisely these images and moods that haunt me after reading. Not the people, and not the feelings. Because I know that real life is not that beautiful. It doesn’t matter – I admire the text anyway. From a distance.
– Expressen
Body Double is a book about obsession – which you can easily become obsessed with. […] The novel’s aesthetically pleasing world-building is at least as well-written as its thriller plot. […] Body Double is a novel for all of us who are obsessed: with the strangely uncanny, with beautiful things, and with obsession itself. Johansson shows great control and skilful craftsmanship – there is no doubt that she has done a very good job of following up her acclaimed debut.
– Lundagård
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