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As If
Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.
Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.
As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.
Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.
As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century a character trapped in reality’s hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 26, 2026
13 people are currently reading
1066 people want to read
About the author
Isabel Waidner
15 books133 followersIsabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist.
Their books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
Waidner's critical and creative texts have appeared in journals including AQNB, Cambridge Literary Review, The Happy Hypocrite, Tank Magazine and Tripwire.
They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Art (with Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London.
Their books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe.
Waidner's critical and creative texts have appeared in journals including AQNB, Cambridge Literary Review, The Happy Hypocrite, Tank Magazine and Tripwire.
They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Art (with Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
March 14, 2026
Primarily, I based my performance on a combination of what I myself had seen of Korine (enough) and the fact I was navigating a set of conditions which, taken together, amounted to Korine's life and produced Korine-like responses. If acting was indeed living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, I had the advantage that on this occasion said circumstances were real.
Not that I didn't get it wrong. I frequently did Korine incorrectly. Like the time I neglected to mispronounce Cyril's teacher's Korean name which I gathered Korine did without fail.
My first encounter with Isabel Waidner's work was in September 2017 when their Gaudy Bauble was entered, and later shortlisted, for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize, of which I was then a readers-panel judge.
The novel began with the memorable line: A formidable micro-horse sprang across a Formica tabletop. By the end of a first paragraph that included the motifs on a sweater becoming animate, and which concluded and this was just the beginning, I realised this was something very different to anything I'd read previously, Awkwardgarde fiction, potentially trailblazing as the authorial stand-in put it before the narrative baton was seized from them by a pegasus, and I must admit it took me several reads of that first page, and a read of the author's PhD thesis, before I really understood what they had achieved: Transliterary, a new genre of its own, "sharing agency (the capacity to influence the narrative) across assemblages of human and nonhuman, fictional and real, material and semiotic 'actors' ... to subvert normative versions of authorship, intentionality, causality, and process."
By the time of Waidner's 2nd novel We are Made of Diamond Stuff, I was, and remain, convinced that they were, in the words that opened my review, Britain's most exciting and important writer, an impression that was fully confirmed by Stirling Karat Gold, which won the one prize that, for me, compares to the Republic of Consciousness in its literary ambition, the Goldsmiths Prize.
And winning that Prize “as a writer lacking the structural privileges related to class, native status and cisgender” (as Waidner commented thanking the Prize organisers and judges), combined with a striking sobriquet of 'a modern-day Joe Orton' bestowed in a Goodreads review by a well-regarded blogger was the starting point for Waidner's fourth novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a brilliant exploration of one of the most neglected barriers to social mobility, cultural capital. That novel memorably included the character Sean St Orton, a version of Joe Orton in an alternative timeline where he escaped the real-life fate of the playwright as described in Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lah.
Lah's work was adapted by Alan Bennett into a screenplay for the 1987 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears, and starring the New Cross born working class actor, Gary Oldman.
And Oldman's upbringings and career are of crucial importance for each of the two main characters in 'As If', Waidner's latest novel, forthcoming in 2026, which again includes social mobility as one key theme. Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine are both, like Oldman, from New Cross and they attended the West Greenwich School in Deptford around 20 years after the actor.
They were in the same year, although Aubrey doesn't seem to remember Korine, and Korine only vaguely remembers Aubrey. Korine remembers wanting to be an actor 'for about a minute aged ten or eleven' after seeing Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, but took Oldman's example as very much an exception that proved the rule, while Lewis pursued a semi-successful acting career, following Oldman's example:
I come from a vastly different set of material circumstances compared to most actors I met in the industry over the decades. You’d think it doesn’t matter, but it does. It means that I come at it, acting, differently. I never even thought of it as something people did until I saw Gary Oldman play Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears one night on the BBC. I was ten or eleven. I was completely arrested. I’d heard that he, Oldman, went to the same secondary school in Deptford as I did, twenty years prior, which can’t have helped my subsequent overidentification with him.
However As If is primarily a distinguished admission to the literary list of dopplegangers, particularly those that represent to each other a different path not taken, from Doestevsky through Beckett to Jon Fosse's Septology and it's two Asles.
Each man has, or had, a wife named Laurie who had cancer, and both couples lived around the Barbican Estate. But Korine's wife is in remission, while Aubrey's Laurie died 18 months earlier. Korine has struggled economically, rather relying on his wife's career, in some form of gathering intelligence. Aubrey began his acting career, at the Barbican, as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot but ended in a long-running (seventeen seasons, three-hundred and eight four episodes) BBC TV series, about two sleuths, each hired to keep an eye on the other, Aubrey in a secondary role as the partner of one of the sleuths.
But Aubrey has become disillusioned with acting, in part after Laurie's death but also realising the TV show is a 'professional, defanged' version of what drew him to acting - 'playing a role, any role, like it mattered'. When is approached to play the lead role in a new series, As If, where the twin secondary roles become the lead, he declines
Meanwhile Korine has left his family, in a 'popping-out-to-the-shop-for-a-pint-of-milk' moment (in a brilliantly written scene involving a kitten), unable to cope with his wife's illness and recovery and the responsibility it transfers on to him, and hiding in the Barbican underpass, Beech Street, sees Aubrey pass by, and, on a whim follows him to his flat. Both men are essentially opting out of their responsibilities - while people 'stepped gingerly over them' (from Waidner's cleverly chosen epigraph from Beckett's Molloy), literally so in Korine's case in the underpass.
The plot has the two men, more by accident than design, and certainly not by connivance, swapping each lives, or, more accurately, swapping roles, an immediate second read strengthening how cleverly this, and the layers of doubling, have been constructed.
But for both Aubrey and Korine, far from playing a role, they need to discover themselves - as Korine notes from watching acting videos 'there is more to acting than just pretending to be someone else'. There's a brilliant passage where Korine's wife remarks sarcastically, as Aubrey starts to mirror Korine's unreliability - 'One thing's for certain, you're getting better at Korine', which he misinterprets as a comment on his acting skills:
On the surface of course, Laurie was affirming me in my role: you're getting better at Korine. But by openly referring to Korine as a third party, she was effectively undermining me in it. She had as good as announced to hypothetical theatregoers that someone, I, was acting while the play was in progress, disrupting the fictive reality.
The novel's title comes - I think even if subliminally - from acting coach Sanford Miesner's (represented in the novel as 'Sandy M.') technique of 'as ifs', building on Stanislasky's concept of particularization: “A particularization, an as, if, is something else. It’s your personal example chosen from your experience or your imagination which emotionally clarifies the cold material of the text.”
And while my reading of the novel erred to a realistic explanation, Waidner (rather like Fosse) leaves open an alternative explanation, including in the novel’s emotionally moving closing scene.
The novel is both unmistakably Waidner - the crisp staccato sentences; the strong sense of place; the keen visual eye and particular interest in fashion (even if here it tending to the beige and unfashionable); the theme of social mobility; and the cultural and literary links (here extended to fascinating insight into the profession of acting) - but a further evolution of their literary style, with the pyrotechnics of Waidner's earlier work perhaps fading, but this allowing the novel to showcase their deeply intelligent writing and empathetic poignacy.
Another brilliant addition to an impressive ouevre.
Thanks to both the publisher via Netgalley but also the author directly for the advanced review copy.
Some visual images from the novel:
I saw Gary Oldman play Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears one night on the BBC
I was sitting in the Barbican underpass, Beech Street I think the official name is, I must’ve seen something. I was sitting on the pavement, leaning against one of the panels cladding the walls: a chipper palette of beige and its foils: light blue, maroon, white, bright yellow, I want to say sand.
The Regency Cafe, Westminister, source of the UK cover photo and perhaps a model for Ludo's.
Twenty or so wooden tables, the typical condiments on each: salt and pepper shakers, sugar pourer, ketchup and brown sauce plastic squeeze bottles. Fake-leather-bound menus, not a tablecloth far and wide ... and framed celebrity photos all over the walls
One of the architectural idiosyncrasies of Basterfield House: sets of concrete steps provided direct access from the communal garden to the balconies of the upper-ground-floor maisonettes.
So I walked, circuting an area defined by my physical capabilities: northbound on Aldersgate Street, then left into Clerkenwell Road leading into Theobalds Road, then left into Southampton Row and left again into Holborn.
He pulled a children's toy, a little monkey with puffy cheeks, a Moncchichi, I believed, out of the plastic bag.
I walked straight into the lead of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner after that. The production, at the National, of all places, marked forty years since the publication of Sillitoe ’s novella.
Sandy M., one of the most influential and revered acting teachers in modern times, sits behind a desk.
Sanford Meisner, explaining to an acting student, reciting Humpty Dumpty, 'that's where your liking for "as if's" comes in.'
Not that I didn't get it wrong. I frequently did Korine incorrectly. Like the time I neglected to mispronounce Cyril's teacher's Korean name which I gathered Korine did without fail.
My first encounter with Isabel Waidner's work was in September 2017 when their Gaudy Bauble was entered, and later shortlisted, for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize, of which I was then a readers-panel judge.
The novel began with the memorable line: A formidable micro-horse sprang across a Formica tabletop. By the end of a first paragraph that included the motifs on a sweater becoming animate, and which concluded and this was just the beginning, I realised this was something very different to anything I'd read previously, Awkwardgarde fiction, potentially trailblazing as the authorial stand-in put it before the narrative baton was seized from them by a pegasus, and I must admit it took me several reads of that first page, and a read of the author's PhD thesis, before I really understood what they had achieved: Transliterary, a new genre of its own, "sharing agency (the capacity to influence the narrative) across assemblages of human and nonhuman, fictional and real, material and semiotic 'actors' ... to subvert normative versions of authorship, intentionality, causality, and process."
By the time of Waidner's 2nd novel We are Made of Diamond Stuff, I was, and remain, convinced that they were, in the words that opened my review, Britain's most exciting and important writer, an impression that was fully confirmed by Stirling Karat Gold, which won the one prize that, for me, compares to the Republic of Consciousness in its literary ambition, the Goldsmiths Prize.
And winning that Prize “as a writer lacking the structural privileges related to class, native status and cisgender” (as Waidner commented thanking the Prize organisers and judges), combined with a striking sobriquet of 'a modern-day Joe Orton' bestowed in a Goodreads review by a well-regarded blogger was the starting point for Waidner's fourth novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, a brilliant exploration of one of the most neglected barriers to social mobility, cultural capital. That novel memorably included the character Sean St Orton, a version of Joe Orton in an alternative timeline where he escaped the real-life fate of the playwright as described in Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lah.
Lah's work was adapted by Alan Bennett into a screenplay for the 1987 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears, and starring the New Cross born working class actor, Gary Oldman.
And Oldman's upbringings and career are of crucial importance for each of the two main characters in 'As If', Waidner's latest novel, forthcoming in 2026, which again includes social mobility as one key theme. Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine are both, like Oldman, from New Cross and they attended the West Greenwich School in Deptford around 20 years after the actor.
They were in the same year, although Aubrey doesn't seem to remember Korine, and Korine only vaguely remembers Aubrey. Korine remembers wanting to be an actor 'for about a minute aged ten or eleven' after seeing Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, but took Oldman's example as very much an exception that proved the rule, while Lewis pursued a semi-successful acting career, following Oldman's example:
I come from a vastly different set of material circumstances compared to most actors I met in the industry over the decades. You’d think it doesn’t matter, but it does. It means that I come at it, acting, differently. I never even thought of it as something people did until I saw Gary Oldman play Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears one night on the BBC. I was ten or eleven. I was completely arrested. I’d heard that he, Oldman, went to the same secondary school in Deptford as I did, twenty years prior, which can’t have helped my subsequent overidentification with him.
However As If is primarily a distinguished admission to the literary list of dopplegangers, particularly those that represent to each other a different path not taken, from Doestevsky through Beckett to Jon Fosse's Septology and it's two Asles.
Each man has, or had, a wife named Laurie who had cancer, and both couples lived around the Barbican Estate. But Korine's wife is in remission, while Aubrey's Laurie died 18 months earlier. Korine has struggled economically, rather relying on his wife's career, in some form of gathering intelligence. Aubrey began his acting career, at the Barbican, as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot but ended in a long-running (seventeen seasons, three-hundred and eight four episodes) BBC TV series, about two sleuths, each hired to keep an eye on the other, Aubrey in a secondary role as the partner of one of the sleuths.
But Aubrey has become disillusioned with acting, in part after Laurie's death but also realising the TV show is a 'professional, defanged' version of what drew him to acting - 'playing a role, any role, like it mattered'. When is approached to play the lead role in a new series, As If, where the twin secondary roles become the lead, he declines
Meanwhile Korine has left his family, in a 'popping-out-to-the-shop-for-a-pint-of-milk' moment (in a brilliantly written scene involving a kitten), unable to cope with his wife's illness and recovery and the responsibility it transfers on to him, and hiding in the Barbican underpass, Beech Street, sees Aubrey pass by, and, on a whim follows him to his flat. Both men are essentially opting out of their responsibilities - while people 'stepped gingerly over them' (from Waidner's cleverly chosen epigraph from Beckett's Molloy), literally so in Korine's case in the underpass.
The plot has the two men, more by accident than design, and certainly not by connivance, swapping each lives, or, more accurately, swapping roles, an immediate second read strengthening how cleverly this, and the layers of doubling, have been constructed.
But for both Aubrey and Korine, far from playing a role, they need to discover themselves - as Korine notes from watching acting videos 'there is more to acting than just pretending to be someone else'. There's a brilliant passage where Korine's wife remarks sarcastically, as Aubrey starts to mirror Korine's unreliability - 'One thing's for certain, you're getting better at Korine', which he misinterprets as a comment on his acting skills:
On the surface of course, Laurie was affirming me in my role: you're getting better at Korine. But by openly referring to Korine as a third party, she was effectively undermining me in it. She had as good as announced to hypothetical theatregoers that someone, I, was acting while the play was in progress, disrupting the fictive reality.
The novel's title comes - I think even if subliminally - from acting coach Sanford Miesner's (represented in the novel as 'Sandy M.') technique of 'as ifs', building on Stanislasky's concept of particularization: “A particularization, an as, if, is something else. It’s your personal example chosen from your experience or your imagination which emotionally clarifies the cold material of the text.”
And while my reading of the novel erred to a realistic explanation, Waidner (rather like Fosse) leaves open an alternative explanation, including in the novel’s emotionally moving closing scene.
The novel is both unmistakably Waidner - the crisp staccato sentences; the strong sense of place; the keen visual eye and particular interest in fashion (even if here it tending to the beige and unfashionable); the theme of social mobility; and the cultural and literary links (here extended to fascinating insight into the profession of acting) - but a further evolution of their literary style, with the pyrotechnics of Waidner's earlier work perhaps fading, but this allowing the novel to showcase their deeply intelligent writing and empathetic poignacy.
Another brilliant addition to an impressive ouevre.
Thanks to both the publisher via Netgalley but also the author directly for the advanced review copy.
Some visual images from the novel:
I saw Gary Oldman play Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears one night on the BBC
I was sitting in the Barbican underpass, Beech Street I think the official name is, I must’ve seen something. I was sitting on the pavement, leaning against one of the panels cladding the walls: a chipper palette of beige and its foils: light blue, maroon, white, bright yellow, I want to say sand.
The Regency Cafe, Westminister, source of the UK cover photo and perhaps a model for Ludo's.
Twenty or so wooden tables, the typical condiments on each: salt and pepper shakers, sugar pourer, ketchup and brown sauce plastic squeeze bottles. Fake-leather-bound menus, not a tablecloth far and wide ... and framed celebrity photos all over the walls
One of the architectural idiosyncrasies of Basterfield House: sets of concrete steps provided direct access from the communal garden to the balconies of the upper-ground-floor maisonettes.
So I walked, circuting an area defined by my physical capabilities: northbound on Aldersgate Street, then left into Clerkenwell Road leading into Theobalds Road, then left into Southampton Row and left again into Holborn.
He pulled a children's toy, a little monkey with puffy cheeks, a Moncchichi, I believed, out of the plastic bag.
I walked straight into the lead of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner after that. The production, at the National, of all places, marked forty years since the publication of Sillitoe ’s novella.
Sandy M., one of the most influential and revered acting teachers in modern times, sits behind a desk.
Sanford Meisner, explaining to an acting student, reciting Humpty Dumpty, 'that's where your liking for "as if's" comes in.'
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Isabel Waidner ( Sterling Karat Gold; Corey Fah Does Social Mobility”) is easily one of the most exciting writers working in the Anglophone world today. Faultlessly experimental and endlessly enjoyable, their books delight in troubling the conventional, historically middle-class concerns of fiction by engaging our surreal, improbable present through a queer, working-class, immigrant lens. In As If, this lens is crystal clear – it informs the narrative in all its light and shade without ever imposing on it.
The novel begins with two strangers meeting in a flat in London; two men who are remarkably alike and whose individual trajectories reveal the road not taken by the other. Most of us would have wondered what it would be like to slip into another version of our lives, to experience the selves we would be if only we had made different decisions, or had been dealt slightly different hands. So have our protagonists Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine. And when the opportunity to explore these mirror lives presents itself, they both – if somewhat reluctantly, and entirely accidentally – take it.
For Korine, who wanted to be an actor ‘for about a minute aged ten or eleven,’ the chance to audition for a role in Lewis’s stead feels like a dream come true. Meanwhile, Lewis, having lost his own wife to cancer two years ago, finds more purpose in playing husband to Korine’s – who happens to be in remission – than in the ‘professional, defanged’ version of acting that his erstwhile TV career had demanded. Both men initially revel in being granted a second chance. But as the substance of their new responsibilities catches up with them, they each realise that ‘there is more to acting than just pretending to be someone else,’ that distance does not lighten the burden of the lived realities they are each running from. Indeed, for all the good it really does them, each alter-ego may well be a figment of their respective imaginations.
As If may be the most accessible of Waidner’s novels: It is far less reliant on the dreamlike, absurdist logic of their earlier works, and more attuned to an emotive, empathetic view into the human condition. The latter is evident, as others have pointed out, in the poignancy of a scene in which a careless remark about a kitten reveals an irreparable crack in a marriage that appeared to have survived its greatest challenge, and in the moment that one of our protagonists finally stops to think:
But it is also unmistakably Waidnerian as a work that examines social mobility and the psychological make-up of working-class artists; in its atmospheric evocation of left-field London and its oddball, self-referential humour. (the TV show Lewis used to act on ‘revolved around the premise of one sleuth A. Smythe, who was hired to keep watch on another sleuth B. Smith who was in turn hired to keep watch on A. Smythe.’ Lewis, of course, played his attention-deprived partner, called C. Schmidt.) While the only queer character here is a minor supporting act in our story (albeit co-lead in the TV show they are to appear in), everything, from the ambiguously gendered names of the characters to the social roles they are trying on for size, harkens to a sense of becoming-through-performance a lá Judith Butler and the queer canon. Even at its most farcical – and certainly at its most existential – this book seamlessly marries critical engagement with compulsively readable prose.
I came to As If with my hopes sky-high (it was in fact my most anticipated book of the year) and found myself nourished and plenty rewarded. It was nothing like I could have known to expect – and it was everything. Pure work of genius, really.
_____
*Fun fact: ‘Dead leaf on springs’ was the working title of the novel, and the scene with the kitten its genesis.
The novel begins with two strangers meeting in a flat in London; two men who are remarkably alike and whose individual trajectories reveal the road not taken by the other. Most of us would have wondered what it would be like to slip into another version of our lives, to experience the selves we would be if only we had made different decisions, or had been dealt slightly different hands. So have our protagonists Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine. And when the opportunity to explore these mirror lives presents itself, they both – if somewhat reluctantly, and entirely accidentally – take it.
For Korine, who wanted to be an actor ‘for about a minute aged ten or eleven,’ the chance to audition for a role in Lewis’s stead feels like a dream come true. Meanwhile, Lewis, having lost his own wife to cancer two years ago, finds more purpose in playing husband to Korine’s – who happens to be in remission – than in the ‘professional, defanged’ version of acting that his erstwhile TV career had demanded. Both men initially revel in being granted a second chance. But as the substance of their new responsibilities catches up with them, they each realise that ‘there is more to acting than just pretending to be someone else,’ that distance does not lighten the burden of the lived realities they are each running from. Indeed, for all the good it really does them, each alter-ego may well be a figment of their respective imaginations.
As If may be the most accessible of Waidner’s novels: It is far less reliant on the dreamlike, absurdist logic of their earlier works, and more attuned to an emotive, empathetic view into the human condition. The latter is evident, as others have pointed out, in the poignancy of a scene in which a careless remark about a kitten reveals an irreparable crack in a marriage that appeared to have survived its greatest challenge, and in the moment that one of our protagonists finally stops to think:
I felt like a dead leaf on springs, meaning a strange mechanism kept me going, resisting environmental forces – goings-on I barely understood – and fighting, in an understated way, for my life.*
But it is also unmistakably Waidnerian as a work that examines social mobility and the psychological make-up of working-class artists; in its atmospheric evocation of left-field London and its oddball, self-referential humour. (the TV show Lewis used to act on ‘revolved around the premise of one sleuth A. Smythe, who was hired to keep watch on another sleuth B. Smith who was in turn hired to keep watch on A. Smythe.’ Lewis, of course, played his attention-deprived partner, called C. Schmidt.) While the only queer character here is a minor supporting act in our story (albeit co-lead in the TV show they are to appear in), everything, from the ambiguously gendered names of the characters to the social roles they are trying on for size, harkens to a sense of becoming-through-performance a lá Judith Butler and the queer canon. Even at its most farcical – and certainly at its most existential – this book seamlessly marries critical engagement with compulsively readable prose.
I came to As If with my hopes sky-high (it was in fact my most anticipated book of the year) and found myself nourished and plenty rewarded. It was nothing like I could have known to expect – and it was everything. Pure work of genius, really.
_____
*Fun fact: ‘Dead leaf on springs’ was the working title of the novel, and the scene with the kitten its genesis.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
| ARC REVIEW | Publication Date: 26th Feb 2026
ᯓ ꒰ Trigger Warnings ꒱ ᯓ
⚠️ Bereavement
⚠️ Cancer
ᯓ ꒰ Summary ꒱ ᯓ ✧
Two virtually identical men, despite having taken different paths in life, find themselves living strangely similar lives to one another. With both men feeling unfulfilled and desperate to get a taste of the life the other one has, they decide to trade places and become the main character in a life that isn't truly theirs. Both men hope this could be their second chance to not mess things up again, but is the grass ever really greener on the other side?
ᯓ ꒰ My Thoughts ꒱ ᯓ
Right from the very get go, Aubrey Lewis' and Lindsay Korine's a-million-mile-an-hour monologues (both inner and outer) gave a fantastic insight into their personalities: both erratic, overwhelmed and indecisive. Both characters were written in a way that portrayed their depth and complexity, making them feel well-rounded and life-like.
I personally haven't read any of Isabel Waider's previous works, and also haven't read a book which is in any way similar to the plot of As If, so I was unsure of what to expect. However, I found it an intriguing story. I thought the level of description was fantastic. And although the story was heavily emotionally motivated, there were several parts which were also comically ironic and slyly funny.
I did find some parts of the story a bit overly complicated and lacking clarity — especially during the parts where the characters' thoughts seemed to wander off on many a tangent — which occasionally made the plot difficult to keep track of. But overall, I thought the book was fast-paced, strangely quirky, and enjoyably surreal, with a premise I've not encountered before.
Thank you to NetGalley, Isabel Waidner, and Penguin General UK | Hamish Hamilton for gifting this eBook in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. All opinions are my own.
ᯓ ꒰ Trigger Warnings ꒱ ᯓ
⚠️ Bereavement
⚠️ Cancer
ᯓ ꒰ Summary ꒱ ᯓ ✧
Two virtually identical men, despite having taken different paths in life, find themselves living strangely similar lives to one another. With both men feeling unfulfilled and desperate to get a taste of the life the other one has, they decide to trade places and become the main character in a life that isn't truly theirs. Both men hope this could be their second chance to not mess things up again, but is the grass ever really greener on the other side?
ᯓ ꒰ My Thoughts ꒱ ᯓ
Right from the very get go, Aubrey Lewis' and Lindsay Korine's a-million-mile-an-hour monologues (both inner and outer) gave a fantastic insight into their personalities: both erratic, overwhelmed and indecisive. Both characters were written in a way that portrayed their depth and complexity, making them feel well-rounded and life-like.
I personally haven't read any of Isabel Waider's previous works, and also haven't read a book which is in any way similar to the plot of As If, so I was unsure of what to expect. However, I found it an intriguing story. I thought the level of description was fantastic. And although the story was heavily emotionally motivated, there were several parts which were also comically ironic and slyly funny.
I did find some parts of the story a bit overly complicated and lacking clarity — especially during the parts where the characters' thoughts seemed to wander off on many a tangent — which occasionally made the plot difficult to keep track of. But overall, I thought the book was fast-paced, strangely quirky, and enjoyably surreal, with a premise I've not encountered before.
Thank you to NetGalley, Isabel Waidner, and Penguin General UK | Hamish Hamilton for gifting this eBook in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5
Lewis is an out of work actor, once successful but now mourning the death of his wife, he is stalled in life. Lindsay has walked out on his wife and child, avoiding life . The two meet in a subway where Lindsay follows Lewis home and moves in.
From this point on the two men's lives swap and change with the roles alternating in a strange story where neither man seems to know what he wants, where he should be or even who he truly is.
As If is a strange tale but surprisingly compulsive reading as you try to work out whether the story is fiction and if either man is real or a figment of the other's imagination.
I did get a bit bewildered at one point but I still couldn't stop reading. Recommended if you enjoy ethereal, existential tales that question most things about reality.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for the advance review copy.
Lewis is an out of work actor, once successful but now mourning the death of his wife, he is stalled in life. Lindsay has walked out on his wife and child, avoiding life . The two meet in a subway where Lindsay follows Lewis home and moves in.
From this point on the two men's lives swap and change with the roles alternating in a strange story where neither man seems to know what he wants, where he should be or even who he truly is.
As If is a strange tale but surprisingly compulsive reading as you try to work out whether the story is fiction and if either man is real or a figment of the other's imagination.
I did get a bit bewildered at one point but I still couldn't stop reading. Recommended if you enjoy ethereal, existential tales that question most things about reality.
Thankyou to Netgalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for the advance review copy.
March 7, 2026
Waidner is one of my favourite authors.
This latest novel is rather more conventional than the previous ones but still excellent nonetheless.
This latest novel is rather more conventional than the previous ones but still excellent nonetheless.
Read
December 28, 2025If I wanted to be cheeky, I’d say this is Gender Trouble without gender. Read in relation to Waidner’s earlier work, which reveled in freewheeling queerness, this marks a 180-degree turn: there’s not a queer in sight. But - and this is why Butler still matters, I think - As If remains firmly on queer ground in how it explodes cherished social roles (fatherhood, nuclear family, the singular person), revealing them as purely performative: no substance, no essence, only repetitions and mirrorings with no origin or ground to speak of. I’m very excited to see what Waidner brings next. Their work has become essential queer reading.
Read
February 28, 2026This, my first taste of Waidner’s fiction, is an oddly charming little novel about two men who essentially swap lives, assuming that both are real, and one isn’t just a funhouse-mirror reflection of the other. But which would be which? One is Aubrey Lewis, whose wife Laurie has just died of throat cancer and whose high-profile on-stage breakdown early in his acting career led him to a safe, stagnant role as a detective’s sidekick on seventeen seasons of a BBC stalwart. The other is Lindsey Korine, whose wife Laurie is in remission from throat cancer; he never pursued acting, initially for fear of mockery at school and later from an apparent lack of stick-to-it-ive-ness, and has bounced between jobs. The men live around the corner from one another. One night, after Korine has walked out on his family and taken to living in the Barbican underpass, he spots Lewis – whom he recognises as a school acquaintance, and to whom he bears some resemblance – and follows him home. Korine goes for a last-ditch TV audition, pretending to be Lewis, and gets the gig; Lewis goes home to Korine’s wife and child, and assumes the responsibilities of parenthood. As If would probably be reminiscent of Paul Auster, if I’d ever read any Auster. (The title refers to the name of the TV project, which is based on a novel that, itself, is some kind of spinoff from Lewis’s earlier show; it also pretty clearly gestures to the novel’s themes of chance, risk, and, faintly, hope.) It’s never so weird as to utterly defy possibility, but it certainly dances merrily along possibility’s edge. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this, mostly down to Waidner’s perfect tone, which contains just the right blend of humor and pathos. I’d definitely read their work again. Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC; As If was published on 26 February.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I liked this both for the story and the style of writing used by the author. I could picture some of the places used in London but also felt a real sense of involvement in the story. I felt that the story had tension and humour. The concept seemed so bizarre that two individuals could trade places with each other and then want to do better in the others' life which then seemed to cause annoyance on the part of the other.
I wasn't sure if there were actually two men or if there was one man imagining the path his life might have taken. As I neared the conclusion of the novel and looked for some kind of ending (as the characters seemed to with their own role swap), I decided that it was a story about one man who was imagining an alternative life with a different ending. The book left me puzzling and did provoke my thinking which I liked.
I don't think either of the main characters is particularly likeable and I think the book is about life more broadly than the individual characters used within it.
If you have a curious mind and want to try something new, a bit different and not too long then I would suggest this.
I wasn't sure if there were actually two men or if there was one man imagining the path his life might have taken. As I neared the conclusion of the novel and looked for some kind of ending (as the characters seemed to with their own role swap), I decided that it was a story about one man who was imagining an alternative life with a different ending. The book left me puzzling and did provoke my thinking which I liked.
I don't think either of the main characters is particularly likeable and I think the book is about life more broadly than the individual characters used within it.
If you have a curious mind and want to try something new, a bit different and not too long then I would suggest this.
March 20, 2026
Another novel from Waidner that is smart with heart. This time the plot concerns an actor and his apparent doppelganger, who also wants to be an actor. These men could be equals except for small differences and exploring this idea provides the drama and absurd humour of the story. We end up with scenes where someone is acting at being an actor and knowing other actors who should know him…
As usual with Waidner's work there are plenty of cultural references which are fun but also a way to explore how performance relates to identity. Sometimes it felt like a re-write of the film PERFORMANCE but I think that is my imagination running away with me.
As usual with Waidner's work there are plenty of cultural references which are fun but also a way to explore how performance relates to identity. Sometimes it felt like a re-write of the film PERFORMANCE but I think that is my imagination running away with me.
January 7, 2026
As If is a story about how we make our own luck, about the expansive nature of second chances, about fate, grief, hope, about how we all seem to think that one day we’ll get to a magical point where everything falls into place, and we won’t question any of our choices ever again. This book is a deeply poignant musing on living life in a busy city, a place where your very existence feels microscopic, and you wonder how many more times you will survive getting spat back out into the cold, concrete landscape.
Waidner writes with a sharp, quick wittedness that weaves its way effortlessly into the narrative, expertly striking the delicate balance of absurdity and dark humour, with a deeply melancholic, and pensive story.
If you like slightly bonkers, surreal, and brilliantly unique narrative voices, you’ll love this! I’m so glad that I’ve discovered Waidner’s writing, and I intend to read their other books very soon.
Thank you Penguin Books, Penguin Hamish Hamilton and Viking Books for sending me this brilliant book, out 26th February 2026.
Waidner writes with a sharp, quick wittedness that weaves its way effortlessly into the narrative, expertly striking the delicate balance of absurdity and dark humour, with a deeply melancholic, and pensive story.
If you like slightly bonkers, surreal, and brilliantly unique narrative voices, you’ll love this! I’m so glad that I’ve discovered Waidner’s writing, and I intend to read their other books very soon.
Thank you Penguin Books, Penguin Hamish Hamilton and Viking Books for sending me this brilliant book, out 26th February 2026.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is based on a prepublication ARC for this short novel that will be published on 26 February, 2026.
3.5 stars rounded up.
This short novel is the story of two men who live around the Barbican in London who live different but weirdly parallel lives. They end up swapping places after both coming to a point of impasse with how their lives are going (Aubrey, an actor, after feeling constrained by his job as a telly actor and the death of his wife and Korine, a husband and father who cannot cope with his wife's illness). The transfer of lives goes as far as to have Korine auditioning and playing roles and Aubrey living with Korine's family.
I found the setting appealing and well described, and understood the motivations of the POV characters in their exchange of lives, even if seemingly more hesitantly in Aubrey's case. This is my first time reading a book by Waidner, and I felt like the experimental nature left me drifting a bit as a reader. However, it felt like something you could acclimate yourself to if you read more of her novels.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this advance copy.
3.5 stars rounded up.
This short novel is the story of two men who live around the Barbican in London who live different but weirdly parallel lives. They end up swapping places after both coming to a point of impasse with how their lives are going (Aubrey, an actor, after feeling constrained by his job as a telly actor and the death of his wife and Korine, a husband and father who cannot cope with his wife's illness). The transfer of lives goes as far as to have Korine auditioning and playing roles and Aubrey living with Korine's family.
I found the setting appealing and well described, and understood the motivations of the POV characters in their exchange of lives, even if seemingly more hesitantly in Aubrey's case. This is my first time reading a book by Waidner, and I felt like the experimental nature left me drifting a bit as a reader. However, it felt like something you could acclimate yourself to if you read more of her novels.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for this advance copy.
February 15, 2026
Lindsey Korine walks out on his wife Laurie (in remission from cancer) and his child into Aubrey Lewis’s flat one evening, after spotting him and following him home.
He and Aubrey are almost identical. Aubrey, an actor,is grief-stricken after the death of his wife Laurie from cancer.
Aubrey has been offered the lead in a television show resurrecting a past character of his. But he’s so mired in his grief, he won’t attend the audition.
Korine goes instead, impersonating Lewis (and none of his previous cast mates or crew seem to realise) and gets the job on behalf of Lewis.
So the two men swap lives. Lewis ends up moving in with Korine’s wife and child. They do know that it’s not Korine, but go along with the pretence, seemingly preferring Lewis.
This is a strange little tale, but then, I wouldn’t have expected anything different from Isabel Waidner.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it though. Although again, that’s probably the point. This is definitely not a story that has a clear path or is neatly wrapped up at the end.
He and Aubrey are almost identical. Aubrey, an actor,is grief-stricken after the death of his wife Laurie from cancer.
Aubrey has been offered the lead in a television show resurrecting a past character of his. But he’s so mired in his grief, he won’t attend the audition.
Korine goes instead, impersonating Lewis (and none of his previous cast mates or crew seem to realise) and gets the job on behalf of Lewis.
So the two men swap lives. Lewis ends up moving in with Korine’s wife and child. They do know that it’s not Korine, but go along with the pretence, seemingly preferring Lewis.
This is a strange little tale, but then, I wouldn’t have expected anything different from Isabel Waidner.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it though. Although again, that’s probably the point. This is definitely not a story that has a clear path or is neatly wrapped up at the end.
March 8, 2026
3.5 didn’t hit like waidner’s earlier work despite knowing it’s the start of a new literary project. surreality added to by intimately knowing the streets it is set in. one to stew
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
As If, the latest novel from Isabel Waidner, is as startlingly original and challenging as any of their other works, though this one feels much more accepting of newcomers than their last novel. This is a story of doubles - nothing new in fiction in that - but the way in which Waidner uses this motif to explore class, identity, queerness, and life itself is brilliant.
Aubrey Lewis is a successful actor, about to head to an audition when Lindsay Korine, an old classmate, walks into his life. Korine has just walked out on his wife and child, and takes Lewis's place at the audition. Lewis, meanwhile, moves in with Korine's wife. This is just the beginning of the mirroring, the doubling up, of a tale that becomes more engaging and entertaining as it progresses and which, by novels end, leaves you certain that Waidner is a great novelist.
I can highly recommend this novel - as I can any of Waidner's other works - and I expect it to be on many best of lists at the end of 2026.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Aubrey Lewis is a successful actor, about to head to an audition when Lindsay Korine, an old classmate, walks into his life. Korine has just walked out on his wife and child, and takes Lewis's place at the audition. Lewis, meanwhile, moves in with Korine's wife. This is just the beginning of the mirroring, the doubling up, of a tale that becomes more engaging and entertaining as it progresses and which, by novels end, leaves you certain that Waidner is a great novelist.
I can highly recommend this novel - as I can any of Waidner's other works - and I expect it to be on many best of lists at the end of 2026.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
March 12, 2026
“I had a bad feeling straight away. People walked out of their lives for good. It happened. I speak from experience.” If “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”, Isabel Waidner’s madcap Kafka-meets-Beckett As If asks us to consider what came first: the performer or the stage? This is a chicken/egg, prince/pauper story told with aplomb, endlessly amused and amusing (the confusing parallelism of the characters and the characters they play, from their names to their characteristics, is just one endlessly fruitful gag). In a way, this doppelgänger mindbender is Waidner’s simplest novel, its plot and its prose very clean and economical: Waidner is more restrained, more refined, but in many ways no less batshit. Arguably here they doing even more than ever, philosophically and creatively, to explore the limits of identity, language, and ontology: what we know, how we know it, how we can be certain of anything. It evokes a series of other people’s questions: who is the dreamer? (Twin Peaks); how can we know the dancer from the dance? (Yeats); will you never have done… revolving it all? (Beckett). Of course Waidner has no interest in answering those questions — who would, who could?! — but delights in pulling the terms of these uncertainties to their ultimate end points, the novel’s tone ranging from that of a sharp satire to a taut thriller in the process. There is something to be said too of inertia, of where it comes from and where it takes us or doesn’t, of what it costs to break out of it; and how, in the hall of mirrors of our own self-involvement, we can ever break free of the delusions that want to destroy / decay us. Personally, politically, socially, creatively, this is a novel — as with most of Waidner’s novels — that unseats the reader from the perch of familiarity-as-complacency, and invites us so generously to other ways of thinking and being.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
As If is the new novel by Isabel Waidner, a story of two men with strangely mirrored lives who want each other's opportunities. Lewis was an actor, but since the death of his wife he's too depressed to go to auditions. Korine has a wife and child, but feels unfulfilled. Both look strangely similar and went to the same school. A chance meeting leads them to talk in Lewis' flat, and from there, their mirror lives turn upside down.
Waidner is one of my favourite current novelists so I was very excited for this book. As If definitely represents a new direction in their writing, though it retains many distinctive elements (in style and existential nature, but also the Prick Up Your Ears references and interest in class and opportunity). It is direct and reflective, without as many surreal turns as their previous novel (and my favourite) Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, but instead plays the dark comedy straight, making the book feel even more like a midcentury British play (fittingly, of course, for the theme of acting and the kinds of plays/playwrights referenced in the book).
As If is a strangely timeless novel that would make an accessible entry point into Waidner's work, but it is also a deeply existential story exploring failures and chances. I like how the story feels so straightforward, but also anything but—a clash between the real and the absurd that creates a hum of humour under everything even as both men fail to get anywhere in their new opportunities. I went into the book expecting another book following Waidner's previous novels, but I got something else, and I'm starting to appreciate that maybe that's what I needed, even if it wasn't what I expected. Whilst reading, I thought it was good but not mindblowing, but now I'm finished, I find that I want to recommend it to everyone.
Waidner is one of my favourite current novelists so I was very excited for this book. As If definitely represents a new direction in their writing, though it retains many distinctive elements (in style and existential nature, but also the Prick Up Your Ears references and interest in class and opportunity). It is direct and reflective, without as many surreal turns as their previous novel (and my favourite) Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, but instead plays the dark comedy straight, making the book feel even more like a midcentury British play (fittingly, of course, for the theme of acting and the kinds of plays/playwrights referenced in the book).
As If is a strangely timeless novel that would make an accessible entry point into Waidner's work, but it is also a deeply existential story exploring failures and chances. I like how the story feels so straightforward, but also anything but—a clash between the real and the absurd that creates a hum of humour under everything even as both men fail to get anywhere in their new opportunities. I went into the book expecting another book following Waidner's previous novels, but I got something else, and I'm starting to appreciate that maybe that's what I needed, even if it wasn't what I expected. Whilst reading, I thought it was good but not mindblowing, but now I'm finished, I find that I want to recommend it to everyone.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Isabel Waidner is one of my favorite contemporary authors. Each book they have written has managed to challenge me.
Their latest, As If, does not have the outrageous weirdness of the previous novels: no recreation of The Upside Down, bullfights or Spider Bambi. Don’t be fooled though, As If may be Isabel Waidner’s most complex novel to date.
Lewis is a b standard tv actor - mostly due to a huge mistake while on a stage production of The Loneliness of a long distance runner. In fact the role is so minor that he’s only recognized by a prosthetic nose that is worn.
In his flat Korine comes over. There’s a possibility that both are the same person. Anyway Lewis has been offered to take part in a bigger production of the tv series, which is a Paul Austeresque series of two sleuths spying on each other.
Korine and Lewis swap places: Korine goes for the role, while the widowed Lewis acts as a father and husband for Korine’s family. As the book proceeds the lives of these two people cross and entwine creating a sort of Beckettian Kafkaesque scenario.
My interpretation of As If is that it’s about identity channeled through the use of the doppelgänger. As the lives of these two people become complex they begin to reflect on their new roles and how they are benefiting and losing from it, the irony being that acting consists of becoming another person, something Korine struggles with as he is already pretending to be Lewis this caught in a double role. While Lewis, in his role as a father and husband notices that there are certain tasks he cannot do but both characters are learning about themselves. Yet to twist things a doppelgänger is an extension or flip side of one’s personality- like Jekyll and Hyde. Are Lewis and Korine playing roles that their subconscious desires?
Written in clear , economical prose, As If is another notch in Isabel Waidner’s impressive bibliography and makes an excellent entry point for a beginner. Highly recommended.
Their latest, As If, does not have the outrageous weirdness of the previous novels: no recreation of The Upside Down, bullfights or Spider Bambi. Don’t be fooled though, As If may be Isabel Waidner’s most complex novel to date.
Lewis is a b standard tv actor - mostly due to a huge mistake while on a stage production of The Loneliness of a long distance runner. In fact the role is so minor that he’s only recognized by a prosthetic nose that is worn.
In his flat Korine comes over. There’s a possibility that both are the same person. Anyway Lewis has been offered to take part in a bigger production of the tv series, which is a Paul Austeresque series of two sleuths spying on each other.
Korine and Lewis swap places: Korine goes for the role, while the widowed Lewis acts as a father and husband for Korine’s family. As the book proceeds the lives of these two people cross and entwine creating a sort of Beckettian Kafkaesque scenario.
My interpretation of As If is that it’s about identity channeled through the use of the doppelgänger. As the lives of these two people become complex they begin to reflect on their new roles and how they are benefiting and losing from it, the irony being that acting consists of becoming another person, something Korine struggles with as he is already pretending to be Lewis this caught in a double role. While Lewis, in his role as a father and husband notices that there are certain tasks he cannot do but both characters are learning about themselves. Yet to twist things a doppelgänger is an extension or flip side of one’s personality- like Jekyll and Hyde. Are Lewis and Korine playing roles that their subconscious desires?
Written in clear , economical prose, As If is another notch in Isabel Waidner’s impressive bibliography and makes an excellent entry point for a beginner. Highly recommended.
November 7, 2025
It's perhaps unfortunate timing but this feels like a belated version of Katie Kitamura's Audition, but with - for this reader - less enticing writing and more mundane characters.
Where Kitamura leaves open spaces that magnify the enigmas in her narrative, Waidner fills them in so there's no room for the reader's imaginative collaboration. Instead, we're told how the main characters feel about their swapped roles, how acting leaves them feeling more themselves - we're even left at the end with the narrator thinking about an audition.
I'll be interested to see how other readers find this, especially if they haven't read Audition or if it's no longer playing in their heads as it was for me.
2.5 stars rounded up as this might have been affected by its juxtaposition in my head with a prior text.
Where Kitamura leaves open spaces that magnify the enigmas in her narrative, Waidner fills them in so there's no room for the reader's imaginative collaboration. Instead, we're told how the main characters feel about their swapped roles, how acting leaves them feeling more themselves - we're even left at the end with the narrator thinking about an audition.
I'll be interested to see how other readers find this, especially if they haven't read Audition or if it's no longer playing in their heads as it was for me.
2.5 stars rounded up as this might have been affected by its juxtaposition in my head with a prior text.
December 3, 2025
As If is due for publication in February 2026.
This is my first time reading a book from Isabel Waidner and whilst I did enjoy it, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I was expecting. However, as I always try to do, I would like to focus on the positives more so than the negative - and there were still plenty of positives!
The book pulls you in from the very first line and truly captivates you. I loved how this one started off. The story is unique but also complex at times to the point where it feels a bit all over and it’s a struggle to keep up. This may be a result of me feeling that the characters were lacking in comparison to the message the novel was aiming to get across.
I did strongly enjoy the first half of the book as well as how the chapters are laid out. The chapter sizes helped the book to keep flowing.
Thank you to Penguin UK & Hamish Hamilton for kindly sending me an early eview copy of this book.
3⭐️
This is my first time reading a book from Isabel Waidner and whilst I did enjoy it, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I was expecting. However, as I always try to do, I would like to focus on the positives more so than the negative - and there were still plenty of positives!
The book pulls you in from the very first line and truly captivates you. I loved how this one started off. The story is unique but also complex at times to the point where it feels a bit all over and it’s a struggle to keep up. This may be a result of me feeling that the characters were lacking in comparison to the message the novel was aiming to get across.
I did strongly enjoy the first half of the book as well as how the chapters are laid out. The chapter sizes helped the book to keep flowing.
Thank you to Penguin UK & Hamish Hamilton for kindly sending me an early eview copy of this book.
3⭐️
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
"Playing a role, any role, like it mattered."
As If is a conceptually intriguing novel that pushes you to think about identity, performance, and the endless possibilities of “what might have been.” The story revolves around two men, Lewis and Korine, whose resemblance and intersecting lives prompt an experiment in swapping roles, exposing how much of who we are is shaped by circumstances and presentation.
The premise of two mirrors of one another, one grieving, one hiding, allows Waidner to explore themes of grief, desire, ambition, and reinvention.
There are moments where the narrative dives into the characters’ interior lives which can be hard to follow. Some sections blur together as Waidner challenges you to question how much of life is circumstance and how much we perform in pursuit of recognition or self-discovery.
If you enjoy literary fiction that examines subjectivity and the fluidity of identity there’s a lot here to mull over.
As If is a conceptually intriguing novel that pushes you to think about identity, performance, and the endless possibilities of “what might have been.” The story revolves around two men, Lewis and Korine, whose resemblance and intersecting lives prompt an experiment in swapping roles, exposing how much of who we are is shaped by circumstances and presentation.
The premise of two mirrors of one another, one grieving, one hiding, allows Waidner to explore themes of grief, desire, ambition, and reinvention.
There are moments where the narrative dives into the characters’ interior lives which can be hard to follow. Some sections blur together as Waidner challenges you to question how much of life is circumstance and how much we perform in pursuit of recognition or self-discovery.
If you enjoy literary fiction that examines subjectivity and the fluidity of identity there’s a lot here to mull over.
March 7, 2026
Read the blurb and picked it up based on its fun concept — two (near identical) men essentially switch lives. Is it fate, chance, or necessity? Is the concept of the novel itself a stylised opportunity to explore and subvert the expectations we have of fiction, particularly its process and causality?
I don’t usually enjoy meta-fiction but this worked really well for me! I think that’s down to how genuine I found Waidner’s prose — it is not trying to outsmart you but is rather inviting you to take from what is there on the page. And even though it’s consciously rooted in a tradition of existentialist literature, the plot and writing is not overly pretentious. Waidner calls it ‘agential realist fiction’ in their critical work — and honestly that definition works for me! Whilst high-concept, there was still a sense of practicality that kept me invested throughout.
I don’t usually enjoy meta-fiction but this worked really well for me! I think that’s down to how genuine I found Waidner’s prose — it is not trying to outsmart you but is rather inviting you to take from what is there on the page. And even though it’s consciously rooted in a tradition of existentialist literature, the plot and writing is not overly pretentious. Waidner calls it ‘agential realist fiction’ in their critical work — and honestly that definition works for me! Whilst high-concept, there was still a sense of practicality that kept me invested throughout.
February 26, 2026
I thought about Laurie, my wife, the fact that I'd known her, and Korine's wife. I thought about Kirstie. I thought about acting, too, and I didn't mean the professionalised, defanged version Id become overfamiliar with. I didn't mean playing Korine either, which, I finally realised, represented this exact sort of acting at best: the Schmidt of this year. I meant acting: playing Simon in an imaginary production of Lord of the Flies. Playing Vladimir in Godot. Playing Colin in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and, even more so, failing at it. And by playing Simon, Vladimir, Colin I didn't mean playing the lead in a major production. I meant playing a role, any role, like it mattered. An image came to me of the child actor I once was, who entertained the sports shop's clientele against their wishes. Who got bullied at school for simply rehearsing. Who wasn't encouraged by anyone, but who insisted on himself with an urgency I'd not known since. This risk-to-life-and-limb sort of actor: who could he be at forty-six, naivety lost, seasoned. The point was, I didn't know. I'd never dared to find out.
I first came across Isabel Waidner in 2017 – a playfully experimental German-British author, cultural theorist and University teacher - who disassembles fictional conventions as a way of disassembling racial, nationality, sexuality and class conventions in British society - when I was one of the judging panel for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize – for which we shortlisted the author for their debut novel “Gaudy Bauble”, a novel which was an integral part of their PhD Thesis. Their second novel “We Are Made of Diamond Stuff” was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness and Goldsmith Prizes, before their third “Sterling Karat Gold” (which made it three RoC shortlists and her first Orwell Prize shortlisting) won the Goldsmith Prize in 2021. That prize (with its normally distinctive trophy being awarded in a virtual ceremony) was then the jumping off spot for their fourth novel (and first with a major publisher) the Joe Orton meets Bambi mash-up “Corey Fah Does Social Mobility” (shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Memorial Award).
And now this their fifth novel – due to be published in February 2026.
The novel has (at least on the face of it) two alternating first party narrators; although each at times openly muses if the other really exists and the reader or is a projected alter ego – and the reader is invited to share and enjoy this ambiguity.
Aubrey Lewis – a long time successful actor in a long running rather surreal detective show which “revolved around the premise of one slueth A. Smyth, who was hired to keep watch on another sleuth B. Smith who was in turn hired to keep watch on A Smythe” (Lewis playing Smythe’s frustrated partner C Schmidt) has fallen on hard times – his wife Laurie dead from cancer, his career ended as the show was cancelled. Now though he has been asked to appear at an audition for a potential spin-off for which he would be the star (one based on a novel “As If”) – something he is reluctant to do – instead walking out of his flat.
Lindsay Korine – a very old distant school acquaintance (from a school which as an aside links via Gary Oldman with Corey Fah) turns up in his flat just ahead of the audition. Korine is homeless having walked out on his wife (also Laurie and who has just recovered from cancer) and child – and decides to take Lewis’s place at the rehearsal and to stay in his vacated flat.
Meanwhile Lewis moves in with Korine’s wife and child.
And both deal with the fear of discovery (while also realising many around them already know of their role playing) while suspecting the other of a staging some form of plot to ruin their own shot at a second chance
For me the novel represents an interesting and evolution and maturing of their writing approach (the author in a dedication to me called it “enter[ing their] middle style”)
Perhaps less experimental - although still way more unusual than even most literary fiction, this has similarities to “Audition” but with a more absurdist stance and the latter was the most experimental book on this year’s Booker.
But very much stronger on empathy and the human condition - one moment in particular when a throw away remark about a cat causes an irretrievable breach in a marriage that has seemingly survived its strongest test almost took my breath away in admiration. Update: I have subsequently found this novel was the first written and the genesis of the novel.
At a launch event for the book - Isabel effectively said (although these are my words) that their three previous books had been a project set in a pre Covid world where progress was being made on various diversity and inclusion areas (BLM, trans rights for example) that they and others had campaigned or wished for over many years - and to some extent the books were a celebration of this world. But now the world felt very different and their fiction had to feel different to - and their real aim here was to allow some space for examining individual and societal loss but not in a way to bludgeon or simply depress the reader but in a way more lightly held and with some humour/absurdity.
Isabel Waidner is an author that deserves even wider recognition than they have already achieved – I would love to see them on the Booker longlist – and I really think this might be the book that achieves that – one which asks what it means in the 21st Century not just to act to believe that you truly have something to live for.
Highly recommended.
My thanks to the author for a review copy and to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin UK for an ARC via NetGalley
March 29, 2026
Here’s a book to read in one quick sitting: a clever doppelgänger tale of two not un-similar looking men, a washed up actor and a runaway father, who meet unexpectedly and begin to live life as each other. This swap is by turns bizarre, funny, tragic, and tender.
How did they come to find each other? Are they really two separate men? There’s no answers here, but rather playful and poignant meditations on performance, grief, and the stories we tell ourselves and others.
Read if you enjoyed: Audition by Katie Kitamura, Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson, The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
How did they come to find each other? Are they really two separate men? There’s no answers here, but rather playful and poignant meditations on performance, grief, and the stories we tell ourselves and others.
Read if you enjoyed: Audition by Katie Kitamura, Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson, The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was intrigued by the premise of this book - a book about two men who look alike (it made me think of dopplegangers) and the different paths they take - a more literacy version of Freaky Friday. However, I found this a little too challenging for me. It's a slow pace and whilst incredibly well written, I found it hard to follow. This did mean the ending gave me a dramatic realisation but I would have liked to unpick it a bit more.
Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced copy.
Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced copy.
February 11, 2026
Such a bizarre read but I actually really enjoyed it. The whole Aubrey and Korine life swap saga kept me entertained. It made me wonder if one or the other was actually real in the end? Their rambling internal monologue's had tones of humour and I can understand why they’d want a second chance by stepping in to each others lives. Really recommend for an intriguing read. Thank you to NetGalley for this arc 🧍♂️🧍♂️
February 27, 2026
Two men meet in a London flat, they’re pretty much identical in looks except one has what the other wants and vice versa. I enjoyed this weird mash up but I did forget who was who half the time, I’d sort of melded the two together without meaning to. I honestly thought it was going end up with it being a multiple personality disorder or an out of body experience but it had intrigued me enough to explore the author’s other works.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Penguin General UK for this ARC.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Penguin General UK for this ARC.
February 27, 2026
What a kooky little thing!! Was very kindly gifted this by Penguin and I must say, it was nice to switch things up. Waidner’s writing is really giving Beckett, and I actually think I enjoyed it!! But it is quite hard to tell when something is sooo nonsensical in places. But I also appreciated it a lot and the sentiment resonated.
March 6, 2026
Just finished and absolutely loved As If by Isabel Waidner - it starts with an absurd situation, one man who resembles almost exactly another turns up out of the blue in his flat. What unravels then is perfectly logical. And playful. And enjoyable. And sets you thinking. Brilliant.
January 24, 2026
longish review incoming!!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
A short but powerful book that reads like a modern fable of ambition and regret. Deeply rooted in an understanding of class, mobility, and the social geography of London. Rich and thought provoking.
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