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  • Published: 1 December 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099461654
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $24.99

The Double




Wherein lies our identity? An existential thriller and work of literature that takes on the essential questions of life

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...

  • Published: 1 December 2005
  • ISBN: 9780099461654
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Jose Saramago

José Saramago is one of the most important international writers of the last hundred years. Born in Portugal in 1922, he was in his sixties when he came to prominence as a writer with the publication of Baltasar and Blimunda. A huge body of work followed, translated into more than forty languages, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago died in June 2010.

Also by Jose Saramago

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Praise for The Double

In the pacy denouement the consequences of the hero's actions are played out with surprising deftness... [An] extraordinarily bold and peculiar romance

The Times

Quite unlike anything else

London Review of Books

A Borgesian fable with a marvellous flavour all its own

Phillip Hensher, Books of the Year, Spectator

Indebted to Borges and with a nod to Auster, he manages to surpass both with the audacity and sheer erudition of his prose

Catherine Taylor, The Guardian

Cleverly written and left me with lots to think about...a very good book

http://www.farmlanebooks.co.uk/

A comic and profound exploration of the self... A uniquely seductive writer

Daily Telegraph

Thought-provoking, scrupulously constructed and narrated with buoyant high spirits

Times Literary Supplement

The Double is Saramago at his most practised and polished. It is philosophy and thriller rolled into one

Independent

Written with gusto, wit an imaginative energy...an urgent and topical masterpiece

Literary Review