The Imposters is the second novel where Tom Rachman has chosen to tell the narrative in short stories. He did the same with his debut, The Imperfectionists. Maybe I didn’t like it quite as much as that book, and my favourite is still The Italian Teacher, but The Imposters has made me no less of a Rachman fan.

Dora is an aging Dutch writer whose last novel didn’t sell, and who seems to want to give up writing, but then appears to be writing the book we’re reading, taking memories from her own life and expanding those into stories about other people.

Some of the stories are incredibly moving, disturbing and wonderful. The best of them would be my favourite stories of the year, but of course in any story collection, even those that form a novel, there will be some that are less successful.

The best include a girl backpacking in India in the 1970s when one of the men she meets disappears and there is nothing to be done; Beck, a comedy writer in LA stuck inside during COVID; Amir detained and then tortured in an Iranian prison; and woman who decides to meet the murderer of her children.

Read it and forgive Rachman for Dora and the slightly weaker stories. Highly recommended.

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Buy The Imposters by Tom Rachman from Bookshop.org.

I listened to this as an audio book from Xigxag. Buy it here.  

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