A Word About Awards

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS by Tom Rachman   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2012   Date Read: February 9, 2011   From Kirkus Reviews: “An English-language newspaper headquartered in Rome brings together a strongly imagined cast of characters in journalist Rachman’s first novel.   Lloyd Burko used to be a stringer living in Paris. He’s still in Paris, but now he’s just an impoverished former journalist who pretends to have a computer and whose latest wife has moved in with the guy across the hall. Arthur Gopal is languishing as an obituary writer until a death in his own life enables his advancement by erasing his humanity. Hardy Benjamin is a business writer, savvy and knowledgeable about corporate finance but utterly hapless in romance. What they have in common is the never-named paper, whose history is doled out in brief chapters beginning in 1953. The novel’s rich representation of expatriate existence surely benefits from the author’s experiences as an AP correspondent in Rome and an editor