REVIEWS
Who to believe in this rich tapestry of eccentrics?
Tom Rachman’s The Imposters begins during lockdown, in the north-west London home of Dora Frenhofer, a spectacularly unsuccessful Dutch novelist, and her husband Barry, an equally unsuccessful “couples therapist”. The marriage is a late one and neither entirely happy or normal – Dora, 73 (Barry is nine years younger), is exhausted and disillusioned, and admits she sought a partner mainly to help her “pull the plug” when she has finally had enough of this world.
It is soon apparent that this odd situation is even odder than it first appears as Dora, as well as being a writer of fiction, is an unreliable narrator of her own existence.
So the scene is set for an intelligent, tricksy novel that engages the reader while constantly keeping you off balance, straining to discern when you are being told the (fictional) truth or spun a yarn.
She may be wholly untrustworthy, but Dora is dryly entertaining,
