Notes from Underground and the Double

Jul 19, 2025 3:52 PM

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky,Ronald Wilks,Robert Louis Jackson

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm Bradbury

Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness.

Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson

Reviews

Trollope, as ever, can be relied upon to deliver a good read

—— Mail on Sunday

An entertaining novel

—— Independent on Sunday

With her customary acute observation, Joanna Trollope examines different attitudes to work, relationships and children...In this engrossing novel, Trollope makes her readers not only identify with her characters but also become deeply attached to them

—— Waterstones Books Quarterly

Hits a right and ringing note and keeps hitting it

—— Independent

Sharp observation of domestic detail

—— Val Hennessy, Victoria Moore and Amber Pearson , Daily Mail

There are delightful moments aplenty ... Any author who has come up with the beautifully silly plan of melding a kung-fu epic with an Iraq-war satire and a Mad Max adventure has to be worth keeping an eye on

—— Guardian

A debut novel of the kind that comes along only once every couple of years, overflowing with imagination yet powered by the kind of cleverly twisting plot that marks him out as a master storyteller ... A quirkily original writer

—— The Scotsman

Has the pace and action of an episode of 24 ... The agility of the narrative is one of the great strengths of this book ... Harkaway is robustly confident ... Particularly effective are his Matrix-like fight scenes, brought to life in meticulous yet flowing prose

—— The Times

A stunning debut ... By turns thrilling, silly, gripping, crazy, daring and outrageous. I loved every minute ... The Gone-Away World is brakes-off fiction

—— Scotland on Sunday

I loved it...exuberant, mind-bending science-fiction/fantasy adventure about truckers, weapons that wreck the very fabric of existence, foul-mouthed drill instructors, ninjas and stuff like that. But by golly it's well written, funny and enjoyable

—— Sam Leith , Daily Mail

With his debut The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway has created a fictional universe that is out of this world

—— Tatler

A big new book by a big new writer. Well done! Harkaway describes The Gone-Away World in words that whiz and ping like bullets ricocheting off the walls of the reader's mind. He's the real thing

—— Russell Hoban

A genuine panoramic, 3D, surround-sound, total-immersion, thrill-factor ten miracle - it is the kind of book that you just don't want to end! ... Engrossing, action-packed ... Very highly recommended

—— SFRevu

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