I ’ve been raving about Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger since I read an advance copy this summer, and when I tell people about it, some of them are baffled: You mean Klein wrote a whole book about being confused with writer Naomi Wolf?

The central conceit of Doppelganger sounds more like the premise for a surreal Charlie Kaufman film than a work by an earnest lefty who usually writes about overweening corporate power. Klein herself is apologetic about it. “In my defence, it was never my intent to write this book,” she says in its first line.