Tom Rachman — The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

Text Publishing 2014 Paperback, 384pp. Tooly Zylberberg was lured from her home as a young girl and grew up in a world of eccentric outsiders. There was the charming but tempestuous Sarah, who sowed chaos in her wake; Humphrey, the Russian émigré who taught Tooly to play chess; and the charismatic Venn, whose worldview transformed her forever. Now, Tooly has left her quiet life in a bookshop in a small Welsh village to return to New York. To make sense of her past. To find out who she really is. Spanning three decades and three continents, Tom Rachman's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers is a story about long-buried secrets and how our lives can seem indecipherable even to us, a story about unexpected connections and the revelations that change everything. (ISBN: 9781922147875). Good.