The Double – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What if you met someone who was exactly you — but better? The Double is Dostoyevsky's darkly comic and deeply unsettling novella about Yakov Golyadkin, a low-ranking St. Petersburg official who one day encounters his exact double — a man who looks like him, speaks like him, but effortlessly succeeds where Golyadkin fails. As his doppelgänger takes over his life, Golyadkin's grip on reality begins to unravel. A brilliant early work that anticipates Dostoyevsky's greatest themes — identity, madness, and the fragility of the self. This Readings Classics edition is a must-read for fans of psychological fiction.