A short, profoundly intelligent novel about two strangers who swap lives to find new ones: a story of aspiration, ambition, and the possibility of radical newness.

Aubrey Lewis and Lindsey Korine are adrift. Aubrey (widower, perma-subletter, retired actor whose career never amounted to much beyond a bit part on a B-list sitcom) and Lindsey (layabout, gambler, hothead, absentee father) meet by chance at a crossroads, literally, and find themselves drawn to and repelled by each other, each the other’s uncanny double.

As Lindsey secretly answers a casting call on Aubrey’s behalf and gets the part, Aubrey finds himself playing father to the other man’s son and being a better husband to the other man’s wife (who shares his own dead wife’s name). Each day the strange ruse becomes truer and stranger, more entrenched. Plunged into an existential game of cat-and-mouse, pursuit and retreat, they find that acting makes it possible to finally act.

Isabel Waidner's As If is a slender, propulsive, and unusually wise novel about what happens when we fall out of our roles and attempt to make new ones: a tale of thwarted expectation, renewed ambition, and the possibility of escape. It is the story of two men, or maybe one: a love story and a ghost story both.