The Imposters
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Imperfectionists, the story of a chameleonic writer desperate to finish her final book, and the indelible characters from her own life who intrude on those efforts with breathtaking results
Dora Frenhofer, a once successful but now aging and embittered novelist, knows her mind is going. She is determined, however, to finish her final book and reverse her fortunes before time runs out. Alone in her London home during the pandemic, she creates, and is in turn created by, the fascinating real characters from her own life.
Like a twenty-first-century Scheherazade, Dora spins stories to ward off her end. From New Delhi to New York, Copenhagen to Los Angeles, Australia to Syria to Paris, Dora's chapters trot the globe, inhabiting the perspectives of her missing brother, her estranged daughter, her erstwhile lover, and her last remaining friend, among others. As her life comes into ever sharper focus, so do the signal events that have made her who she is, leaving us in Dora's thrall until, with an unforeseen twist, she snaps the final piece of the puzzle into place.
The Imposters is Tom Rachman at his inimitable best. With his trademark style—at once "deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate" (Washington Post)—he has delivered a novel whose formal ingenuity and flamboyant technique are matched only by its humanity and generosity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rachman returns with a droll if uneven novel in stories, the form he used with such brilliance in The Imperfectionists, this time charting the lonely days of a Dutch novelist. Dora Frenhofer, it seems, is inventing fictional characters to replace the people no longer in her life. In her commitment to writing, she's spurned friends and family, including her children, though her sacrifice hasn't yielded many readers. Rachman's narrative, in turn, comprises Dora's stories. One, titled "The novelist's estranged daughter," takes the point of view of Dora's daughter, Beka, a California comedy writer going stir crazy during the Covid-19 lockdown. Some are captivating, especially "The man who took all the books away," a harrowing and Kafkaesque tale of a young Syrian man's imprisonment for possessing a borrowed phone containing a video satirizing the country's president. Others, though funny, have less heft, such as "A writer from the festival," which tracks a third-rate novelist's misadventures as he tries to promote his work ("Come one, come all," reads his advertisement for a reading; in the end, Dora writes, "All couldn't make it. Nor could one"). Rachman remains a master comic stylist, but here the whole is less than its gleaming parts.
