“It don’t matter how long you been overseas,” a brash U.S. As in The Imperfectionists, the expatriate experience is a major element here, and one that resonates strongly with me. In this way the novel strikes me as being very relevant and contemporary. Rachman skewers two main symptoms of the modern condition: rootlessness and purposelessness.

Only later” (Humphrey) and “Nobody changes! At heart everyone’s the same at eight as at eighty” (Sarah). Was only the latest valid?” And again: “‘Does it feel,’ she asked, ‘when you’re telling these stories, does it feel like it’s you? Or does it feel like a different person back then?’” As two of her blithe guardians reply: “I’m the same as I was. “She found herself inhabiting a new character, uncertain whether this edition was more or less true, and whether there was a pure state of Tooly-ness at all…People manifested so many selves over a lifetime. This is perhaps the greatest lesson Tooly has to learn: your location in time and space do not determine who you are. The fact that her parentage is just by the by, though, forms a central point of the book: family is who you make it, and one’s essential self is always the same, despite the passage of years and changes in outward circumstances. We don’t learn who her real parents are until over two-thirds of the way through, for instance. The story of plucky bibliophile Tooly Zylberberg and her cast of wildly unsuitable parental figures, spanning more than two decades and ranging from Brooklyn to Bangkok (with stop-offs at a musty bookshop in rural Wales), takes its time revealing major secrets. (4.5) A novel that requires – and rewards – patience. power, to the digital revolution of today. Then, the old mysteries stir again, sending her – and the reader – on a hunt through place and time, from Wales to Bangkok to New York to Italy, from the 1980’s to the Year 2000 to the present, from the end of the Cold War, to the rise and wobbles of U.S. Years later, she has lost hope of ever knowing what took place. There was Humphrey, a curmudgeon from Russia there was the charming but tempestuous Sarah, who hailed from Kenya and there was Venn, the charismatic leader who transformed Tooly forever. But who were the people who brought her up? And what ever happened to them? In childhood, she was spirited away from home, then raised around Asia, Europe and the United States. Yet there’s one tale that never made sense: her own life. Tooly Zylberberg, owner of a bookshop in the Welsh countryside, spends most of her life reading. It’s a novel of curious personalities, mystery, and lots of books: volumes that the characters collect, covet, steal. What follows is an abduction, heated political debate, glimpses into strangers’ homes, and travel around the globe. The Rise & Fall of Great Powers begins in a dusty bookshop.

The imperfectionists by tom rachman