This sits at the top of my list of favourite Pandemic novels. Dora Frenhofer's bittersweet story of a novelist's life closing in on her (but it's also opening up) will stay with me for a long time. I'm a Tom Rachman fan. Highly recommend this novel, despite its somewhat darker tone.

I think the writing in this novel is well-written and the characters are interesting but I waited too to read it and my tastes for fiction have changed. Can’t give a real review as it is just a style not to my liking any longer.

simply cannot get through another self-indulgent author-on-authoring book. i'm not even trying to drag this book, i just can't get past the premise here. DNF

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown, and Company for providing me an advanced electronic copy of this book for review. I loved Rachman's book The Imperfectionists. While this follows a similar format, I just could not get into it. I ended up reading it in small increments between other books. Maybe if I had stuck with it and read it straight through I would have enjoyed it more but it is just not one that I would recommend.

The novel delves into the contemplations of an elderly author named Dora as she reflects on her mortality. The reader gains insights into Dora’s life through the chapters of her latest book, which are interspersed with her personal diary entries. As the narrative unfolds, the reader becomes privy to how Dora’s writing was shaped by her real-life experiences and how her stories unveiled her inner truths.

Dora’s fictional chapters possess the allure of short stories, often delivering impactful moments without neatly tying up loose ends. If you require every detail to feel satisfied, this might not be your ideal read. However, I appreciate how Rachman invites the reader to engage and fill in some of the narrative gaps themselves.

This meta-fictional work, alternating between wry and sardonic and deeply poignant, proved to be a delightful literary journey.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

DNF @ 10%. This book isn’t for me. Maybe I will try it again in the future. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This was the first book I've read by Tom Rachman. I thought it was just okay. I had a hard time getting into it and it was really easy to just set down and wait days to pick back up. I felt like I was forcing myself to read it.

I loved Rachman’s book ‘The Imperfectionists’ so I was happy to get my hands on a copy of his latest book. I went into it with high hopes tho was unfortunately let down a bit.

I did recognize immediately the same wry, clever humor & the top of the line prose, Rachman knows how to toe the line between comedy/satire and literary fiction quite well to create a perfect blend of both. My problem was more so that certain storylines just didn’t draw me in and I felt a compulsion to skim over certain POVS. I felt that the storyline meandered a bit when we were with certain characters, I would have much preferred to just stick to the story about the brothers in jail the whole time.

This wasn’t bad by any means but not the great book I was hoping for. A solid 3.5 stars.

Tom Rachman does it again. Another work of genius from the master of the interconnected stories. I really enjoyed this one.

I've been reading Tom Rachman for years and I think he's sorely underrated. His stories are always full of character and deeply funny. Will recommend this one, but not purchase for school.

The Imposters
Dora Frenhofer was an aging author whose books were no longer appealing to publishing editors. She also faced dementia and the eventual end of her life. Over her lifetime she had alienated many who had once been friends. Her only daughter had very little contact with her.
In an effort to forestall her demise, she wrote a final book of short stories about people and incidents in her life. When Covid caused a lockdown in London where she lived, she became truly isolated.
I did not enjoy this book. I had a hard time with the mostly unlikeable characters including Dora. I also did not like the lack of connection between the stories. I was interesting in reading this book because I had enjoyed his debut novel, The Imperfectionists.
I received this ARC from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I'm a Tom Rachman fan, but this was not it for me. I just couldn't stay interested, and it took me forever to finish.

I usually love him but I got 65% through my e-ARC and threw this proverbially across the room. What was even happening? I don't know and I didn't care. Very disappointing.

Such a great read! Each chapter could stand on its own, but the links between them would be lost. Dora reminds me of Hagar Shipley - such a curmudgeon at first glance, but also so vulnerable.

The Imposters by Tom Rachman is a recommended literary novel told in stories.

Dora Frenhofer is an aging author with a failing memory. She wants to finish one more novel but she also knows her mind is going. It's the pandemic, she's in lock down and writing chapters about characters who are based on interesting individuals from her life. She invents stories that are likely based on her real life. Taken together, the stories the individuals chapter tell work together to create a whole picture.

This novel may, perhaps, not be one that everyone will generality enjoy. Many will appreciate the skillful, elegant writing but not everyone is going to like the literary device where the individual stories make up the totality of the novel. There were parts of the novel that I enjoyed very much, but not the entirety.

Normally, I appreciate character studies and novels that focus on character development, however, I felt very disconnected from this novel. I found it very difficult to immerse myself in the stories and care about the overall theme. What is clearly present is a depressing tone.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

Dora is an older person who is alone in the world, partly by design, but she is obviously lonely. She is a published author of books that failed to sell. Yet, she still has an agent. Still is invited to a writer's conference in Australia. There have been people in her life, but she is largely estranged from her daughter and others disappeared, drifted away or were just random people she met and was pulled to for a brief time. She decided long ago not to die like her father did, unable to control his body and out of it for some years. Dora still has the urge to write. We understand that her recognition of who she is and how her life has gone, including her writing, tells her she doesn't have a good book in her.

But... Tom Rachman has a good book in him, and it is Dora's book. The Imposters is a literary feat, organized by chapters that relate to Dora but we don't necessary know where she fits in. The overall story is about Dora and various people important to her. None of these people are living their authentic lives. You know who they are and can connect them to Dora title of each chapter: "The novelist's missing brother; The novelist's estranged daughter. The man who took all the books." Interspersed with the chapters are pages from Dora's journals that tell us her thoughts on the subjects of the chapters. The Imposters may well become my favorite book of 2023. It's engaging, character driven, each chapter a stand alone short story, sketching a period in the subject's life that is powerful. It's not exactly sad, but you feel sympathetic to everyone, even the rather unlikeable Dora, who seems to have never found her way in the world. It is a story of a life, told through moments in lives of those who know her. It's more than clever. It's genius. I couldn't put it down.

Dora, a less than successful novelist, is reaching the end of her days. It is the time of Covid and she is alone, writing her last manuscript, consisting of stories based on both herself and people who have been in her life. The tales are loosely linked and presented in The Imposters as stories within the book.

The structure of this book is a bit different and sometimes it takes a while to find the interlocking relationships in the stories. There is tragedy but also quite a lot of humor. I enjoyed the writing best when it focused on Covid times and the political climate. The poignant musings on aging and end of life were right on target.

This book won’t be for everybody. If you enjoy literate, adroit writing, you might find The Imposters of interest.

As I read The Imposters, the brilliant new novel by Tom Rachman, I couldn’t help but think of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. In Mother Night, the protagonist did terrible things while posing as a Nazi, arguing ever afterward that he was only pretending in order to do good things. The novel has its flaws but it sticks in my memory as a story about how what we pretend to be can effectively become who we are. The Imposters is also a novel about what we pretend to be. Unlike Mother Night, however, Rachman takes us underneath the veneer of those pretensions to reveal quivering fear and insecurity. It is one of the most unsettling works of literary psychology I’ve ever read.

The Imposters revolves around unsuccessful (not to say failed, exactly) author Dora Frenhofer. Dora is best known for one book, her memoir, which is the one she hates the most. Her fiction never really took off but critics noted that Dora has a remarkable talent for observing her fellow human beings. We meet Dora near the end of her long life. She’s started to mix up and forget words. Even though she’s in relatively good shape for an elderly woman these symptoms make her believe that she’s about to begin a precipitous decline. So much so that Dora starts to give away her possessions and “prepare” for the end.

We learn all of this—and many other things about Dora’s long, lonely life—through a curious montage of diary entries and stories of people who intersect with Dora. The structure of The Imposters strongly reminded me of another twentieth-century classic: If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler, by Italo Calvino. In Calvino’s novel, we follow a pair of readers who have to keep exchanging books because they always get the wrong one. Both The Imposters and If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveler jump from genre to genre with each chapter, playing on our human tendency to try and find connections between things even if the only thing that links them is proximity. The Imposters makes it easier to spot connections. The more we learn about Dora, the more we see similarities between her, her life, and the myriad of people in the book’s chapters. There are so many similarities that, in the end, one has to wonder just how much of the preceding book was reality and how much was a product of Dora’s imagination as she tries to get out just one more book. Spotting the connections and similarities made my English major heart very happy; I love a metafictional puzzle.

Above all the small coincidences and similarities between Dora and her characters (people who stumble in and out of her life?), there is one major theme. Nearly every character in this book is an imposter of some kind or suffers from imposter syndrome. While all of these characters is putting up a front of success or forgiveness or at least basic functionality as a human being, we get to look beneath the surface to see all of their worries. The author who’s finally been invited to attend a literary conference wrestles with his desire to be respected by other literary fiction authors against his desire to be a bestseller, even if it means writing genre fiction. A father worries and frets that his worst secret will come out if his son and his son’s half-sister become friends but attempts to act as though nothing is wrong. A comedy writer flirts with turning to the dark side by possibly parlaying a cancel culture scandal into financial success. None of these characters feels repetitive; instead, each telling of imposture is like looking at different manifestations of insecurity or trying to deal with difficult emotions solo.

This book will delight former English majors, given all the literary gems there are to uncover. I also think this book might be a tonic for people suffering from imposter syndrome themselves. The Imposters is almost like a literary therapy session—uncomfortable, sure, but it might hold some insight that we can use to shake off self-imposed feelings of failure and confusion about what we are or ought to be.

Tom Rachman is definitely one of my favourite authors, this time I feel he has outdone himself again. The way the disparate characters tie together at the end is nothing short of genius, and the whole time you are reading you have no idea that the characters are all real in some way.

I devoured The Imperfectionists and had very high hopes for Tom Rachman's latest book, The Imposters. I did see his trademark humor and ability to turn a phrase. Interlocking stories is a great literary device and one I enjoy, However, I just could not get into this book. While many of the characters are well drawn the book as a whole just seemed to wander and the individual stories suffered perhaps because they were the work of the lead character, an author with burgeoning dementia. I would have loved the book to be just about the brothers in prison. That section kept me in its grip.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little Brown for the Advanced Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.