'A clever critique of the newspaper industry, and a fascinating character study into damaged people.' Marie Claire

' The Imperfectionists will strongly satisfy.a magnificent tribute to the fall of newspapers.' Vogue ' The Imperfectionists is a winning mixture of warmth, wit, poignancy, quiet insight and powerful melodrama.' Courier Mail ' The Imperfectionists is a precise playful fiction, with a deep but lightly worn intelligence.' Times Literary Supplement 'So good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off.The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching.' New York Times Book Review 'Rachman paints the characters' small dramas and private disappointments with humanity and humour.' New Yorker ' The Imperfectionists joins that short list of fine novels about journalism, which includes Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.' Age The Imperfectionists was longlisted for the The Giller Prize, and Rachman's second novel, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, will be published by Text in February 2014.

He has worked as an editor at the foreign desk of The Associated Press in New York, as an AP correspondent in Rome and as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Tom Rachman was born in 1974 in London, and grew up in Vancouver. The Imperfectionists touches on the fall of newspapers and the rise of technology but, above all, it is a wise and moving novel about unusual, endearing characters. Tom Rachman's debut novel is beautifully written, intelligent, and makes us care about people who are both flawed and immensely engaging - about their lives, their families, and about the larger family that is their newspaper. While the news of the day rushes past, the true front-page stories for all of them are the blunders and triumphs of their own lives. The Imperfectionists is a novel about the peculiar people who write and read an international newspaper based in Rome: from the obituary reporter who will do anything to avoid work, to the dog-obsessed publisher who seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer. Lloyd Burko is having troubles with his sources, with his technology at the paper, and with his family.

The imperfectionists novel