The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
One of the most acclaimed books of the year now available in paperback, Tom Rachman’s debut novel follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters and editors of an English-language newspaper in Rome.
| “Marvelous… a rich, thrilling book… a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader’s fun.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times |
Malcolm Gladwell: You and I, it turns out, have more than a few things in common. We were both born in Britain and moved to Canada as boys. Both our fathers are professors, and our mothers are therapists. We both went to the University of Toronto, and we both moved to the United States after graduation to work in the newspaper business. We’re the same person! Does this mean my love for The Imperfectionists is no more than a kind of displaced narcissism?
Tom Rachman: I confess—we are in fact the same person. I hadn’t wanted you to learn this in such a public forum, but I am your double. Doppelgänger or not, I’m delighted you liked the book. And in a fruitless attempt to pretend we’re actually different people, let me ask you something about your early days in newspapers. When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out. How about you? Was journalism what you expected?
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