Alone in her London home during the pandemic, she creates, and is in turn created by, the fascinating real characters from her own life. She is determined, however, to finish her final book, and reverse her fortunes, before time runs out. 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 Dora Frenhofer, a once successful but now aging and embittered novelist, knows her mind is going. “When a Tom Rachman novel lands in the bookstores, I stop living and breathing to devour it. (Apr.From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Imperfectionists, the story of a chameleonic writer, and the indelible characters in her orbit, in a novel about love, the power of art, and what we leave behind. As the ragtag staff faces down the implications of the paper's tilt into oblivion, there are more than enough sublime moments, unexpected turns and sheer inky wretchedness to warrant putting this on the shelf next to other great newspaper novels. Throughout, the founding publisher's progeny stagger under a heritage they don't understand. Late in the book, as the paper buckles, recently laid-off copyeditor Dave Belling seduces the CFO who fired him. Obit writer Arthur Gopal, whose “overarching goal at the paper is indolence,” encounters personal tragedy and, with it, unexpected career ambition. In the opening chapter, aging, dissolute Paris correspondent Lloyd Burko pressures his estranged son to leak information from the French Foreign Ministry, and in the process unearths startling family fare that won't sell a single edition.
Chapters read like exquisite short stories, turning out the intersecting lives of the men and women who produce the paper-and one woman who reads it religiously, if belatedly. In his zinger of a debut, Rachman deftly applies his experience as foreign correspondent and editor to chart the goings-on at a scrappy English-language newspaper in Rome.
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