The Imperfectionists

"Bush Slumps to New Low in Polls" 

  Paris Correspondent-Lloyd Burko  

Lloyd shoves off the bedcovers and hurries to the front door in white underwear and black socks. He steadies himself on the knob and shuts his eyes. Chill air rushes under the door; he curls his toes. But the hallway is silent. Only high-heeled clicks from the floor above. A shutter squeaking on the other side of the courtyard. His own breath, whistling in his nostrils, whistling out.  

Faintly, a woman's voice drifts in. He clenches his eyelids tighter, as if to drive up the volume, but makes out only murmurs, a breakfast exchange between the woman and the man in the apartment across the hall. Until, abruptly, their door opens: her voice grows louder, the hallway floorboards creak-she is approaching. Lloyd hustles back, unlatches the window above the courtyard, and takes up a position there, gazing out over his corner of Paris.   She taps on his front door.  

"Come in," he says. "No need to knock." And his wife enters their apartment for the first time since the night before.   He does not turn from the window to face Eileen, only presses his bald knees harder into the iron guardrail. She smoothes down the back of his gray hair. He flinches, surprised to be touched.  

"Only me," she says.  

He smiles, eyes crinkling, lips parting, inhaling as if to speak. But he has no reply. She lets go.  

He turns finally to find her seated before the drawer where they keep old photographs. A kitchen towel hangs from her shoulder and she wipes off her fingers, damp from peeled potatoes, dishwashing liquid, diced onions, scented from mothballed blankets, soil from the window boxes-Eileen is a woman who touches everything, tastes all, digs in. She slips on her reading glasses.  

"What are you hunting for in there?" he asks.  

"Just a picture of me in Vermont when I was little. To show

Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He lives in Rome.

Marvelous A rich, thrilling book that is both a love letter to and epitaph for the newspaper world Mr. Rachman s transition from journalism to fiction writing is nothing short of spectacular. The Imperfectionists is a splendid original, filled with wit and structured so ingeniously that figuring out where the author is headed is half the reader s fun. The other half comes from his sparkling descriptions not only of newspaper office denizens but of the tricks of their trade, presented in language that is smartly satirical yet brimming with affection.
Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off. I still haven't answered that question, nor do I know how someone so young ... could have acquired such a precocious grasp of human foibles. The novel is alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching."
Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review (Front-Page Review)

"[An] acute debut [Rachman] paints the characters small dramas and private disappointments with humanity and humor."
The New Yorker

[A] beguiling first novel One by one these journalists are trotted through their tragicomic hamster wheels Rachman [is] always finding new ways to surprise us.
Washington Post

Charming. .. . The print newspaper may be an endangered species, but the newsroom - with its deadlines, quirky characters and investigative crusades - still makes for a good story.
New York Newsday
 
Laced with humor, irony and compassion. . . . some of the chapters are absolute gems.
Dallas Morning News
 
The Imperfectionists will make you laugh and cry. It's the rare novel that can shift emotional tone effortlessly . . . Magnificent.
Seattle Post Intelligencer
 
Rachman has created a series of vividly memorable characters.
The Boston Globe

Rachman is