The night before Naomi Klein won the inaugural Women’s prize for nonfiction, she discovered that someone had been going round London tearing down posters advertising her book. “And the weird thing is, I didn’t know what had angered them: vaccine disinformation, Zionism, or climate change and Fossil Free Books,” she told the assembled crowd.
Klein’s winning book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, is an analysis of shadow identity that opens with a riff on the infuriating, longstanding confusion between the author and feminist turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. It ends with a deeply felt meditation on the mirroring of victim and persecutor evident in the current war in Gaza.