“ The subject of imposture is always an interesting one, and impostors in one shape or another are likely to flourish as long as human nature remains what it is, and society shows itself ready to be gulled .” Bram Stoker
Hanna Johansson’s Hitchcockian literary thriller Body Double cleverly exposes the gap between the selves we conceal and the faces we show the world. As winter descends, a young transcriber follows the same routine each day. Her solitary life is unremarkable until the day she hears a message meant only for her. Across the city, two women accidentally swap coats at a department store cafe. This brief encounter sparks something electric and strange, but soon, one starts to take over the other’s life.
Set between 1930s London and the Cornwall coast, Henrietta McKervey’s The Woman in the Water is inspired by an unsolved puzzle at the heart of Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel Rebecca . Pearl Day lives in the background as a companion to dazzling but volatile Lady Eleanor Nicholson. When Eleanor shoots her lover in a drunken rage, Pearl becomes the key witness in a scandalous murder trial. With Eleanor behind bars, Pearl sees a chance to escape her life of quiet desperation. But which of them pays the ultimate price?
Hanna Johansson is a Swedish writer and critic who writes on such topics as art, literature, and queer issues. Antiquity , her debut novel, won the 2021 Katapultpris and was short-listed for the Borås Tidning. The Woman in the Water is Henrietta McKervey’s fifth novel. She has a Hennessy First Fiction Award and won the inaugural Maeve Binchy Award. She contributes on culture and entertainment to the Irish Times, Irish Independent and RTÉ Radio 1.
In conversation with author and critic Neil Hegarty.