Nora Gold’s Doubles is a stunning novella about a twelve-year-old girl placed in an institution in 1968 after the death of her mother. Written with beautiful prose and assured deftness, Doubles is a powerful meditation on loss, as well as a breathtaking elegy for all children who are dependent for their well-being on a profoundly flawed child welfare system. Heartbreaking, gorgeous, and quietly devastating, Doubles is a tour de force.

This novella is fantastic: well-written, great pacing and tension, with a sharp and unwittingly witty narrator. The ending is perfect and, in a way, redemptive and hopeful. An amazing book.
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Doubles, Nora Gold’s elegant novella about a girl’s descent into sheer loneliness, has something of Mordecai Richler’s merciless wit, and also of Cynthia Ozick’s playfully somber storytelling. But most of all, Doubles reads like the work of an original literary voice—a voice endowed with tenderness, compassion, political memory, and clarity of moral vision. Nora Gold’s fiction keeps breaking one’s heart as it lives on in the reader’s memory.

Nora Gold rises to new heights with her sixth book, Doubles. This novella is superficially simple but actually quite complex. The writing is beautiful. Serious ideas are expressed in this short but complicated book. Only an author of Nora Gold’s skill and experience could have pulled off this tour de force. Brava.
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