Naomi Klein’s reckoning with her famous double, and with what doppelgangers have to tell us about our world.

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.