The Double Life of Mr. Alfred Burton
1913
Alfred Burton is an ordinary young man, an auctioneer's clerk in London, going about his dull routine until the day he shows a client around an estate and discovers a locked room with a dark history. Inside, he finds an unusual plant bearing strange fruit. Curiosity overwhelms him. He eats one. The effect is immediate and irreversible. He emerges into a world transformed, where beauty and truth press against his consciousness with unbearable intensity, where he sees, truly sees, the people and possibilities around him. But can he return to his former life when he now perceives its hollowness? Oppenheim crafts a quietly unsettling fairy tale for adults, a story about awakening and the loneliness of seeing what others cannot. The double life of the title belongs not to a spy or criminal but to any person who has ever eaten of a forbidden fruit and found themselves estranged from the ordinary world they once inhabited.
