The Perfect Man

The Perfect Man explores the power-both destructive and liberating-of what is not told, of the secrets that can shape us more profoundly than everything we believe to be true. ajiv Travers, the child of an Indian mother and English father, is abandoned first to relatives in London and later to the care of his uncle's mistress, Ruth Winters, who lives in a small American town. Beginning with Ruth, a remote figure who writes romance novels filled with perfect men, this town turns out to be as exotic and strange to Rajiv as he is to its inhabitants. But Rajiv, though always an outsider, finds love when he is befriended by four of the town's children. As the children grow older, their friendship becomes increasingly intense, and is complicated not only by desire and shifting loyalties, but also by the personal failings-and secrets-of the adults around them. ne secret in particular is masked by silence- the mystery surrounding the death, years before Rajiv's arrival, of an autistic child. When the silence breaks, the violence, anger, and madness that erupts costs one of Rajiv's friends the chance for any real future. s Rajiv tries to establish his place in a town besieged by what ca

About the Author :
Naeem Murr was born and raised in London and has lived in the USA since 1987. He has published a number of prize winning stories and novellas. His critically acclaimed first novel, The Boy, was published in 1998 and has been translated into six languages.

Review :
"Doing for 1950s small-town America what The Last Picture Show did in film, Naeem Murr... has created a fully-fledged, self-contained world, with a vast array of characters, each quixotic and authentically flawed" -- Lionel Shriver Financial Times "At one level, The Perfect Man is a very competent coming-of-age novel, exploring friendship, love, heartbreak and the chilling dawn of adult wisdom in Rajiv and his group of friends. But it is also a book about arrival and departures, about developing roots in a place, particularly as an outsider" Times Literary Supplement "Where to begin? This novel has so many layers, all feeding on the theme of human imperfection and the way that we treat supposed outsiders" The Times "Carefully paced with memorable incidents and brilliant flashes of poetic description, the nevertheless muted tone of the book's slow burn makes the unremitting cataclysm, when it arrives, all the more shocking" Glasgow Herald "Murr's Booker longlisted novel is an eloquently constructed fiction... his verbal chiaroscuro of darkness and light, inky imagery and sun-dappled lyricism, creates a vision of lost innocence" Sunday Times