The Great Impersonation

The great 'double man' spy story that sold a million copies

While in East Africa, by an extraordinary coincidence, Sir Everard Dominey stumbles upon the camp of his German doppelganger Baron Leopold von Ragastein. When the disgraced and penniless aristocrat returns to England in 1913, he appears to want to do nothing more than restore his family name and cure his wife, whom he had once driven to madness. Is the man who has returned really Sir Dominey, or is it von Ragastein who has stolen Sir Dominey's identity after conspiring to murder him in Africa all in order to become a sleeper agent to spy on British establishment?

Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation was a Top-10 bestseller in the US and sold over a million copies in 1920 alone. The Guardian included the novel on its '1000 Novels Everyone Must Read'list in 2009 and it has been adapted into three feature films.

"Escapism on a grand scale" -- David Lehman

"Grandly scaled old-school espionage" Kirkus Reviews