A novel about obsession disguised as literary scholarship, Hallucinating Foucault follows a young academic who travels to Paris to study a reclusive, semi-mythic French writer.

Duncker stages a tense intellectual duel — between critic and author, reader and text, desire and authority — with Foucault hovering as atmospheric tension. Very much his thing even now.

The novel works in the register of the gothic and the theoretical at once. It’s steeped in questions about authorship, sexuality, power and the instability of narrative voice. Rather than parodying post-structuralism, it inhabits it — exposing how theory and longing bleed into each other.

Dark, austere, and unusually controlled, it belongs to that mid-90s moment when literary fiction was in open dialogue with continental philosophy.