I first heard about this six months ago on a Abc book show podcast and interview with Tom Rachman ,it really appealed to me as the short stories in the book are interlinked around the fact that all the people in the stories work for an international paper Based in Rome ,Rachman himself is an ex pat american that lives in Rome having worked for a number of years as a journalist in particular for the international herald tribune which must be a slight template for the novel .In the book we meet the staff of the newspaper eleven of them in all in between each story you get a little bit of history of the paper from its early days in the fifties to modern-day ,the staff range from the work shy obituary writer who lurks and tries to avoid work as much as possible .foreign correspondents ,my favourite is the old arabic correspondent based in Cairo Winston ,from his name you know this guy is very old school he only speaks in english and is unwilling to chase down  his stories .Rachman has an eye for detail in the modern world and through the constant mentions of Blackberries is an obvious crackberry guy . As the stories testify the world of newspapers is a shrinking world and for a small paper like this one a real struggle to get by sometimes in the increasing world of web-based news where the information is on hand straight away .

1954 Corso Vittorio Rome

The paper was established on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele a broad East West thoroughfare lined with dirty white travertine churches and blood orange Renaissance palazzi .many of the buildings in central Rome were coloured as if from a crayon box: dagger red ,trumpet yellow ,rain cloud blue .

At the start of the first notes the are between the chapters illustrating the papers history ,here its base in Rome .

The characters seem real enough and would imagine Rachman has taken bits of people he has met over his time as a journalist .A stunning debut is let down slightly by a dreadful cover on the uk version ,That I feel doesn’t represent the book at all .The book mirrors in style if not content Tsiolkas the slap which I reviewed a few days ago on the blog ,both use different narratives and characters centred round a central theme in this case the paper ,Rachman’s characters on the whole are more even than Tsiolkas but the subject matter maybe a lighter in this book than in the slap .The book is also promote on Rachmans beautiful site .The book is published in the uk by Quercus .