Young Professionals Book Club: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

We are looking forward to a fun discussion about Tom Rachman's highly acclaimed debut novel, The Imperfectionists. It was selected as an Amazon.com  "Best Book of the Month" (April 2010), and praised by the New York Times as being "so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he (Tom Rachman) pulled it off."

Please join us Wednesday, June 15, at 7 pm in our Main branch.

Synopsis on Amazon.com:

Printing presses whirr, ashtrays smolder, and the endearing complexity of humanity plays out in Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Set against the backdrop of a fictional English-language newspaper based in Rome, it begins as a celebration of the beloved and endangered role of newspapers and the original 24/7 news cycle. Yet Rachman pushes beyond nostalgia by crafting an apologue that better resembles a modern-day Dubliners than a Mad Men exploration of the halcyon past. The chaos of the newsroom becomes a stage for characters unified by a common thread of circumstance, with each chapter presenting an affecting look into the life of a different player. From the comically overmatched greenhorn to the forsaken foreign correspondent, we suffer through the painful heartbreaks of unexpected tragedy and struggle to stifle our laughter in the face of well-intentioned blunders. This cacophony of emotion blends into a single voice, as the depiction of a paper deemed a "daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species" becomes more about the disillusion in everyday life than the dissolution of an industry.