Showing results by author "Tom Rachman" in All Categories

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.

Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English-language newspaper as they struggle to keep it - and themselves - afloat. This hilarious and poignant look at the struggles of print news will establish Rachman as one of the 21st century’s most perceptive talents.

Rome, 1955. The artists gather for a picture at a party in an ancient villa. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast canvases, larger than life, is at the center of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot. From the side of the room watches little Pinch - their son. At five years old he loves Bear almost as much as he fears him. After Bear abandons their family, Pinch will still worship him, striving to live up to the Bavinsky name.

Tooly Zylberberg, the American owner of an isolated bookshop in the Welsh countryside, conducts a life full of reading, but with few human beings. Books are safer than people, who might ask awkward questions about her life. She prefers never to mention the strange events of her youth, which mystify and worry her still. Taken from home as a girl, Tooly found herself spirited away by a group of seductive outsiders, implicated in capers from Asia to Europe to the United States. But who were her abductors? Why did they take her? What did they really want?

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

Rome, 1955. The artists are gathering together for a photograph. In one of Rome's historic villas, a party glitters with socialites and patrons. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast, masculine, meaty canvases, is their god. He is at the centre of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot. From the side of the room watches little Pinch - their son. At five years old he loves Bear almost as much as he fears him. After Bear abandons their family, Pinch will still worship him, while Natalie faces her own wars with the art world.

Nine-year-old Tooly is spirited away from Bangkok by a seductive group of outsiders who take her from city to city across the globe. At 20, she is wandering the streets of Manhattan with a scribbled-on map, scamming strangers for her shadowy protector, Venn. Now, aged 31, she runs a secondhand bookshop on the Welsh borders and has found peace with her strange upbringing - until she's called to return to New York to see her dying father. Warm, hilarious and fizzing with intelligence, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers is a masterpiece about the search for identity.

Four acclaimed novelists write their first stories for radio. The Coup by Tom Rachman describes how a protest threatens to turn into a coup, in London' s genteel Kensington, which is next door to where the two Geralds have just moved in. Steak by Evie Wyld, describes how a group of male barflies in small town Australia are unsettled by the appearance of Mariella. In She Wiped The Surface, Louisa Young, describes how a mother happily arranges her daughter's birthday party, but this masks a family bereavement. How to cope?

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.

For admirers of Tom Rachman's work, this is a return to the formal ingenuity and technique that he exhibited so flamboyantly in his debut. It's set during a crisis in democracy, a society in lockdown linked digitally but convulsed by a social media frenzy, and is told by a little-known, little-read Dutch novelist named Dora Frenhofer, who has decided that her life as an old woman in this post-truth pandemic world has become too much. But like a twenty-first century Scheherazade Dora spins stories to fend off the evil day, conjuring connections from her past to give meaning to the present.