For admirers of Tom Rachman's work, particularly The Imperfectionists, this is a return to the formal ingenuity and technique that he exhibited so flamboyantly in his bestselling debut,

The Imposters is told in nine chapters, each of which feature characters who flit in and out of each others' stories, united by their connection with an austere and opinionated and unread Dutch writer, Dora, They exist either through close relationships, like her lovers, children and siblings or more tangentially, removal men, couriers and delivery drivers, brought into her orbit during lockdown,

In between chapters is the commentary of the author, Tom Rachman, a novelist who no longer knows if there is any point to his struggles to write but who will, at the close of each such section will reveal the beginning of the next chapter,

He becomes a kind of auto -fictional Scheherazade, greeting each dawn with a new story, a new riff on the themes that have become our obsessions in the post-truth pandemic years of Covid-19,