As If

Wonderfully implausible and absurdly humorous, the latest novel from a Goldsmiths Prize-winner follows a rich tradition . . . As If is a great step forward, a maturing of Waidner's talent with no loss of the quixotic qualities that gave the other books their charm . . . It adds depth without sacrificing energy . . . Kafka and Beckett are good touchstones, because, like Waidner, they are very funny without telling obvious jokes . . . the language in As If never does what we expect . . . it gives the story an impressive dynamism
Daily Telegraph

A daring doppelganger puzzle . . . The Goldsmiths prize-winner’s fifth novel channels The Comedy of Errors by way of Samuel Beckett . . . the novel feels calculatedly aloof, the emancipatory glee of Waidner’s past work giving way to a more subterranean drama shaped by psychic contortions of dissimulation and masquerade . . . A taut psychological puzzler, As If leaves behind antic cartwheeling – no UFOs or repurposed celebrity biographies – for suspense and ambiguity
Observer

Suffused with cosmic bafflement and dark humor. As If plays to these strengths, suggesting how a profusion of selves and their attendant possibilities lie hidden beneath the crust of a chosen identity . . . . Amid the dizzying back-and-forth, Waidner conceals a subtle exploration of midlife crisis. The foreclosed potential of one life clarifies the possibility of another
The New York Times

A surreal existential caper exploring identity and performance, midlife purpose and regret, and the difficulty of finding - and escaping yourself . . . Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition [of dopplegangers], following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Kafka and Beckett . . . Sly, absurd and poignant, it is a triumph of narrative voice
Spectator

The new novel from the queer experimentalist extraordinaire Isabel Waidner . . . Waidner's writing, always dazzlingly clever and formally inventive, is here also deeply moving. As If is a great success and an intriguing departure: a dourly beguiling dark comedy about fluffing your lines halfway through the performance of a lifetime and being given another chance
Times Literary Supplement

An existential farce that playfully explores the precarity of working life . . . In Waidner-world the surreal is always lurking, gleefully waiting to trip the reader up. As If uses the acting profession and its inherent themes of performance and doubleness to explore the precarity of work . . . Waidner possesses something of Orton’s macabre relish at kicking back at authority [and their] brand of anarchic dissonance and absurdist comic jolts buoy the novel along
Guardian

One of Britain's most exciting writers
New Statesman, 'Best Fiction of 2026'

Waidner’s craft is evident in the comically intricate layers of performance and mirroring that quickly accrete in the text . . . As If becomes a concise and clever take on Jung’s concept of the shadow self – a parable on the failure to accept one’s true desire, and to later find oneself haunted by the vestige of a former self
Irish Times

Cult author Waidner has, over the course of four novels focusing on working-class, queer and British identity, become something of an underground national treasure
Daily Mail

Funny and incisive, Waidner’s latest piece of genre-busting fiction is a surreal tale of two men with an uncanny resemblance to one another who cross paths and, essentially, swap lives . . . A very clever exploration of alternative lives and paths not taken
Marie Claire