Going Loco Book

In late 1976 a German newspaper broke the story that three members of ABBA had been killed in a plane crash at Berlin's Templehof Airport (Frida survived, horribly disfigured, if you're wondering) and that they had been silently replaced by imposters. A rival hypothesis had it that ABBA were the studio creation of some particularly ugly Swedes and that the smiling happy people on those videos were in fact actors. If Lynne Truss doesn't know these rumours about double ABBAs, then there's something distinctly uncanny about her new novel ... Belinda Johansson is a happily married Claphamite writer, a teensy bit self-absorbed, who decides to abandon her girls' horsey stories to investigate the literary life of the doppelgänger. Around the same time, she hires Linda as her cleaner and then watches helplessly as Linda gradually takes over her life, becoming Be-Linda. Meanwhile her actress friend Maggie is sleeping with the double of her therapist's husband and investigations suggest that Belinda's husband Stefan is not in fact a Swedish geneticist at all ... Trying out a hitherto unknown ABBA-inflected Anglo-Swedish idiomatic, Truss tightens up all her narrative strands to breaking point and then stands well back, letting them unwind at breakneck speed. Funny, pacy, scary, neurotic and addictive. Just like ABBA. -- Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.ukRead More