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The Imposters

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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 increasingly unpredictable 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 in her orbit. As her own 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” (The Washington Post)—he has delivered a novel whose formal ingenuity and flamboyant technique are matched only by its humanity and generosity.
“When a Tom Rachman novel lands in the bookstores, I stop living and breathing to devour it. It’s hard to think of anyone who has a better grasp on the world we live in (and I mean, like, the entire planet) and can write about it with such entertainment and panache.” —Gary Shteyngart
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    • Library Journal

      January 1, 2023

      In The Wind Knows My Name, the celebrated Allende blends two bitter tales of separation: in 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is placed on a Kindertransport train by his mother so that he can escape the Nazis, while in 2019 Arizona, Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S. border after they have fled El Salvador for safety. In the latest from multi-award-winning Israeli author Appelfeld, Tel Aviv shopkeeper Yaakov Fine decides to travel to Poland, A Green Land, to visit his parents' ancestral village and is delighted by all he sees until he tries to purchase the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust. With Be Mine, Pulitzer Prize winner Ford offers his final Frank Bascombe novel, with Frank in his twilight years facing the heart-shredding task of tending a son diagnosed with ALS (100,000-copy first printing). Following the Reese's Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Medie's Nightbloom features Selasi and Akorfa, cousins and best female friends in Ghana until Selasi becomes angry and withdrawn for reasons that take decades to emerge. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, her first novel in over a decade, PEN/Malamud and Rea Award winner Moore plumbs love and mortality in a tale interweaving vanished journals, a visit to a dying brother, and the questionable death of a therapy clown and an assassin. A novel-in-stories like Rachman's 500,000-copy best-selling debut, The Imperfectionists, The Impostors sets end-of-rope novelist Dora Frenhofer the task of completing her final book in pandemic lockdown, as she comes to understand her own life by contemplating her missing brother, estranged daughter, lost lover, and one enduring friend (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Schulman's Lucky Dogs, two women (one a U.S. television star seeking anonymity) forge a friendship while waiting on an ice cream line in Paris, but despite a shared history of having experienced male violence, one will betray the other. From Slimani, author of the New York Times best-booked The Perfect Nanny, Watch Us Dance portrays biracial siblings in late 1960s Morocco (their father is Moroccan, their mother French) who deal differently with the era's uncertainties; tough-minded Aicha wants to study medicine in France, while her rebellious younger brother Selim would rather hang out with the hippies converging on his country.

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      April 15, 2023
      The final manuscript by an elderly novelist whose memory is failing is the springboard for a meditation on the creative process and the loneliness of the writer's life. Dora Frenhofer was never a bestselling author, and over the years her "succession of small novels about small men in small crises" have sold fewer and fewer copies for smaller and smaller publishers. Now, 73 years old and isolated in her London home by the pandemic lockdown, she works desultorily on a new novel written in her own voice ("not pretending to be anyone else for a change"), with each chapter centered on a different character. These chapters alternate with diary entries that describe Dora's experiences during the lockdown and end with various crossed-out sentences that eventually lead to the opening of the next chapter. Each chapter's protagonist is someone connected to Dora: her estranged daughter, her brother, an immigrant hired to clear out her house, a fellow participant in a literary festival, a bicycle deliveryman, a former lover, and a longtime friend. She invents stories for them--an unrequited love, imprisonment and torture, the murders of two children--that are slowly revealed to be Dora's embroidery of events from her own history. Or are they? Nothing is for certain in an intricately braided narrative that constantly suggests new possibilities about the factual underpinnings of fiction. The characters are viewed through Dora's uncharitable eyes; the compassion for damaged souls that suffused such earlier Rachman novels as The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers and The Italian Teacher is still in evidence here, but it's muffled by Dora's brutally blunt judgments of their personal failings and professional failures--and her own. The interplay among various versions of the characters' links to Dora is fascinating, and Rachman's prose is lucid and elegant, as always. But the bleak tone throughout, culminating in an appropriately grim conclusion, makes this austere novel difficult to engage with emotionally. Fine, uncompromising work likely to prompt admiration more than wholehearted appreciation.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 17, 2023
      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. Agent: Natasha Fairweather, RCW Literary.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from May 1, 2023
      How does a novelist retire? Is there an organization one notifies? Anyone to arrange a cake and a gold watch? These are just some of the questions Dora Frenhofer ponders as she realizes her career as a midlist author is winding down. Nevertheless, she persists, maintaining a regular diary whose entries inspire flights of creativity. She recalls her eternally teenaged brother, Theo, long missing after an ill-fated trip to India. She contemplates her estranged daughter, Beck, a stand-up comedian of some notoriety out in L.A. Most intoxicating, though, are the people whose paths tangentially intersect hers--a fellow author at a writer's conference, a middle-aged delivery man, a friend suffering an unspeakable tragedy. That Dora views theirs lives as more captivating than hers, which seems to be dwindling, is sharpened by the fact that Dora is facing this crisis of confidence as the world is embarking on the pandemic lockdown. Rachman's nuanced exploration of creativity's staying power, a writer's inherent desire for relevance, and the marketplace's malleable definition of success unfolds with refined subtlety through interconnected tales. The characters arguably each deserve a novel of their own, yet it is Dora's story Rachman focuses on with admiration and just a hint of awe.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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