The Imposters

A Novel

By: Tom Rachman

Narrated by: Fenella Fudge

From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Imperfectionists, the story of a chameleonic writer desperate to finish her final book, and the indelible characters from her own life who intrude on those efforts with breathtaking results

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. From New Delhi to New York, Copenhagen to Los Angeles, Australia to Syria to Paris, Dora's chapters trot the globe, inhabiting the perspectives of her missing brother, her estranged daughter, her erstwhile lover, and her last remaining friend, among others. As her life comes into ever sharper focus, so do the signal events that have made her who she is, leaving us in Dora's thrall until, with an unforeseen twist, she snaps the final piece of the puzzle into place.

The Imposters is Tom Rachman at his inimitable best. With his trademark style—at once "deliciously ironic and deeply affectionate" (Washington Post)—he has delivered a novel whose formal ingenuity and flamboyant technique are matched only by its humanity and generosity.

©2023 Tom Rachman (P)2023 Bond Street Books

Critic reviews

"Smart, thoughtful and beautifully written . . . The Imposters is a spectacularly virtuoso achievement and Rachman’s finest novel."—Toronto Star

"Tom Rachman's bustling, globe-trotting new novel manages to be about a writer's life ending, quietly, lonesomely—even as it bursts with characters, plots, humor and drama. . . . Rachman, a former A.P. foreign-news editor, has a far-and-wide imagination, and his novel is ingenious: investing a protagonist at the twilight of her life with grand, restless vision."—Vogue

"[The Imposters] is imaginative and creative but also chilling and mercenary. . . . Despite its existential sadness and profundity, it is entrancing, light, witty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. Rachman's prose is graceful, lucid, and seemingly effortless. His narrative . . . is gripping and original. He conjures complete and engaging characters as fast as any other fiction writer I can think of."—Washington Examiner