Mine’s a Double, or What’s in a Name? February’s book group choice was The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, written and set in the 1950’s. John, a lonely and depressed English academic, is on holiday in France (he is fluent in French and teaches French history), when he meets a man who is his double in appearance and voice. The two have dinner together, John’s new acquaintance drugs him, and steals his identity. John awakes the following afternoon, mistaken for his doppelganger, the Comte Jean de Gué, a rakish and decadent aristocrat whose family and business have degenerated, largely through the fault of the Comte. John fills the place of the Comte and might be said to turn round both the business and the family in the short space of a week. There are too many threads of plot running through the book to summarise here, but it is an interesting take on the doppelganger story, and one of the points the reader draws from it is that neither character is justified in his discontent...