In the lead review in Sunday’s NYT BR, Christopher Buckley calls The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, “…so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off,” and says he almost pities Rachman, “…because a debut of this order sets the bar so high.”

The novel is the story of a declining newspaper, told through the eyes of various members of its staff. Louis Bayard, in the The Washington Post, says it  “…is about what happens when professionals realize that their craft no longer has meaning in the world’s eyes…and that the only people who really understand them are on the same foundering ship, and that, come to think of it, they really loved that damn ship for all it made their lives hell.”

The attention brought the book to #4 on Amazon sales rankings yesterday, where it remains today.  It was also featured as an Amazon “Best Book of the Month.”

The book generated a lot of excitement in the fall of 2008, when seven publishers were bidding for the rights to publish it.  Dial’s Susan Kamil won, paying somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, according to The New York Observer. Kamil was also the editor of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Holds are building on light ordering by libraries, with several showing ratios of over ten holds per copy.

The Imperfectionists Tom Rachman Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: The Dial Press – (2010-04-06) ISBN / EAN: 0385343663 / 9780385343664

Adobe EPUB eBook available from OverDrive.

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