The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Tom Rachman (Get this book)
Rachman follows his best-selling debut with the haunting tale of a young woman reassessing her turbulent past.In 2011, Tooly has washed up after a lifetime of wandering in a small Welsh village, where she uses the last of her money to buy a used bookstore. Twelve years earlier, in 1999, she's a vagabond 20-year-old on the streets of New York City who talks her way into law student Duncan's apartment by pretending it was her childhood home. Actually, her childhood was spent traveling around Asia with her father, Paul, until, in 1988, she's scooped up in Bangkok by her feckless mother, Sarah, and falls in with a band of peripatetic misfits led by Venn, a coolly manipulative con man. The overwhelming emotions here are loss and regret, as Tooly realizes how she was alienated from her own best instincts by a charismatic sociopath.Brilliantly structured, beautifully written and profoundly sad.--Kirkus