THE THIRTY-ONE LEGS OF VLADIMIR PUTIN by PS Cottier and NG Hartland

It’s often said that we all have a doppelgänger somewhere in the world. Chances are we’ll never meet them. Closest I got was being accosted in the streets of London, many moons ago, by Brit upon Brit doing weird hand gestures and saying “Boo-ya-ka-sha” before cracking up laughing. It wasn’t until I was leaving when a security guard at Heathrow asked me if I was Ali G. Granted, I used to wear ski goggles and a bandana, and I’m a awkward looking Jew, but still… It was unsettling.

Now imagine you looked like one of the most famously reviled people on Earth. That’s the premise of this totally bonkers book - winner of Finlay Lloyd’s 20/40 novella prize - in which eighteen dead ringers for Putin regale the reader with tales of hilarity, inconvenience, paranoia, war and profiteering (stripper Vlad was my fave). The common thread: they’ve all been retained by the Russian government to act as stand-ins should the real Vlad visit their country.

It’s a virtuoso act of ventriloquism that is so patently absurd that it borders on genius. I’m not sure it counts as a novella, per se, but I didn’t care. It’s a bloody hoot.

The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin by PS Cottier and NG Hartland
Finlay Lloyd, 2024
109 pages