As If

Wonderfully implausible and absurdly humorous, the latest novel from a Goldsmiths Prize-winner follows a rich tradition … As If is a great step forward, a maturing of Waidner’s talent with no loss of the quixotic qualities that gave the other books their charm … It adds depth without sacrificing energy … Kafka and Beckett are good touchstones, because, like Waidner, they are very funny without telling obvious jokes … the language in As If never does what we expect … it gives the story an impressive dynamism * Daily Telegraph *A daring doppelganger puzzle … The Goldsmiths prize-winner’s fifth novel channels The Comedy of Errors by way of Samuel Beckett … the novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner’s past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade … A taut psychological puzzler, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling – no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies – for suspense and ambiguity * Observer *A surreal existential caper exploring identity and performance, midlife purpose and regret, and the difficulty of finding - and escaping yourself … Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition [of dopplegangers], following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett … Sly, absurd and poignant, it is a triumph of narrative voice * Spectator *The new novel from the queer experimentalist extraordinaire Isabel Waidner … Waidner’s writing, always dazzlingly clever and formally inventive, is here also deeply moving. As If is a great success and an intriguing departure: a dourly beguiling dark comedy about fluffing your lines halfway through the performance of a lifetime and being given another chance * Times Literary Supplement *An existential farce that playfully explores the precarity of working life … In Waidner-world the surreal is always lurking, gleefully waiting to trip the reader up. As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work … Waidner possesses something of Orton’s macabre relish at kicking back at authority [and their] brand of anarchic dissonance and absurdist comic jolts buoy the novel along * Guardian *One of Britain’s most exciting writers * New Statesman, ‘Best Fiction of 2026’ *Waidner’s craft is evident in the comically intricate layers of performance and mirroring that quickly accrete in the text … As If becomes a concise and clever take on Jung’s concept of the shadow self – a parable on the failure to accept one’s true desire, and to later find oneself haunted by the vestige of a former self * Irish Times *Cult author Waidner has, over the course of four novels focusing on working-class, queer and British identity, become something of an underground national treasure * Daily Mail *Funny and incisive, Waidner’s latest piece of genre-busting fiction is a surreal tale of two men with an uncanny resemblance to one another who cross paths and, essentially, swap lives … A very clever exploration of alternative lives and paths not taken * Marie Claire *This is a stunning book with much to say about how grief can alter our life (or lives). A towering achievement from one of contemporary literature’s most original minds * Kirkus Reviews *

Isabel Waidner is the author of five novels - including Sterling Karat Gold, which won the Goldsmiths Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. They teach in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London.

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