The Rise & Fall of Great Powers
A novel about books, travel, and lying
The story begins in a bookstore. What follows is an abduction, glimpses into strangers’ homes, and travel around the globe. It’s a novel of weirdos, mystery, and plenty of books: volumes that the characters collect, covet, steal. Tooly Zylberberg has spent most of her thirty-odd years reading but there’s one tale that never made sense: her life. In childhood, she was spirited away from home, then raised around Asia, Europe and the United States. But who were the people who brought her up? Humphrey was a Russian curmudgeon, and there was the charming but tempestuous Sarah, plus Venn, the charismatic rogue who transformed Tooly. Until, quite suddenly, they vanished from her life. Years later, she has lost hope of knowing what took place. Then, the old mysteries stir, sending her – and the reader – on a hunt from rural Wales to urban Bangkok to New York to Italy, from the 1980’s to the Year 2000 to the present.
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