By: Shawn D.,
on 6/17/2014
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers has a wonderful sense of time and place ('88 Bangkok, '99 New York, '11 Wales) and a great cast of characters (Tooly, Venn, Humphrey). On the last page, I felt lucky to have met these newfound friends but sad to say goodbye. Books mentioned in this post The [...]
By: Tom Rachman,
on 6/2/2014
Naming a novel is painstaking, agonizing, delicate. But does the title matter? It certainly feels consequential to the author. After several years' battle with your laptop keyboard, after 100,000 words placed so deliberately, you must distill everything into a phrase brief enough to run down the spine of a book. Should it be descriptive? Perhaps [...]
By: Shawn Donley,
on 3/28/2014
Tom Rachman has an uncanny ability to create well-developed and fully realized characters. His debut novel, The Imperfectionists, was a staff favorite here, and I have no doubt that his follow-up, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, will prove just as popular. It has a wonderful sense of time and place ('88 Bangkok, '99 [...]
