CAPGRAS’s syndrome, in which sufferers are convinced that an impostor is posing as a close relative or friend, is a dream for fiction writers.
It was, for example, the idea behind Don Siegel’s marvellous 1956 film , and it forms the core of this strange and engrossing novel by Richard Powers. In Powers’s story, a young man is involved in a road accident and develops Capgras’s syndrome as a result: he thinks both his sister and his dog are impostors.
Simple enough, but place is the real key to this story. It is located in the…
