It’s 2:47 a.m. and I just finished Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. This book wrecked me in the best possible way. I feel like I just lived ten different lives inside one newsroom.
It’s set at an English-language paper in Rome, and every chapter is someone new. A reporter who’s running out of relevance. An editor who can’t face what’s coming. A reader who loves the paper more than the people who make it. They’re all falling apart a little, and somehow it’s beautiful.
I couldn’t stop reading. The sentences are clean and sharp but they hit like truth you didn’t expect to hear. The book made me think about how fragile it all is: communication, journalism, everything we rely on to make sense of the world. I kept thinking about how I read the news from different countries I’ve lived in and how every headline is a different version of the same event. Rachman gets that. His characters are chasing truth, but what they really find is each other, and sometimes they don’t even realize it??
“I laughed. I cried.” I feel like I’d been awake for years. Every person in this story is flawed and human and trying their best, and by the end I wanted to hug them all. I closed the book and just sat there staring at nothing, thinking about how messy and gorgeous this life all is.
If you need something that will pull you out of your world and drop you right into someone else’s heart, read this. I can’t sleep now. I don’t even want to.
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