Life Stories 
 Captured instantly by the delicious opening chapter of this book, with its warm characters and intelligent humor, I wanted nothing more than to plunge into the rest. It says something that my interest never flagged, even though circumstances forced me to spread it out over six days. Indeed, I may even have benefited by having time to let the intriguing protagonist get into my bloodstream, and ponder the gradually unfolding mystery of her life story. 
 When we first meet her, Tooly Zylberberg is the owner of a run-down second-hand bookstore in the Black Mountains of Wales, hoping to profit from spillover trade from nearby Hay-on-Wye. It is clear that this is never going to be a money-making proposition, but her book-inspired conversations with her impulsive young assistant Fogg seem compensation enough. At this point, we know little of Tooly, save that she is in her early thirties and bought the bookstore on a whim. The year is 2011. 
 The rest of the novel will flip between short chapters set in three periods: 1988, when Tooly is a child in Bangkok, 1999-2000, which sees her as a young adult in New York, and 2011, which has a number of other settings as well as Wales. We will meet her in the company of at least three men, any one of whom might be her father, although none quite seems to fill the bill, and in occasional contact with one charismatic but unstable woman who may or may not be her mother. What is her family background? Has she perhaps been abducted? Who is paying the admittedly small amounts necessary for her to live her lifestyle as a questing free spirit? We discover the truth only gradually, each chapter in one decade providing a nugget of information to illuminate our reading of the next. This is no mere authorial contrivance--Tooly herself does not know all the answers; the essential action of the book is her search for her own heritage. 
 Rereading my summary above, I see that the novel might come over as unduly fanciful, with Tooly as a Holly Golightly figure, or female Holden Caulfield, who never sets foot on solid ground. And I have to admit that, in maintaining the mystery of his supporting characters, especially the three men, Rachman must avoid giving them the solidity that would serve as an anchor for Tooly's high-flying kite. He will bring them all into focus by the end of the book, but the strategy is indeed a risk. But it matters less than you would think, because Tooly herself is her own anchor, rooted by her warmth, her intelligence, her autodidact's curiosity, and her willingness to do anything to preserve a friendship. The publisher calls Tooly "one of the most engaging heroines in contemporary literature." From the enchanting beginning to the delectably understated ending, I totally agree. 
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 I mentioned Salinger and Capote as possible godfathers for Tooly Zylberberg, and I am sure there are many others. But I was also haunted by hints of big novels from the last year or so: Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, for the way one section alters our perspective on the one before; Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, for the young protagonist, benevolent older mentor, and several episodes on the fringes of legality; Bob Shacochis' The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, for its view of a character reinventing herself each decade; and Marissa Pessl's Night Film, for the intricacy of its New York adventures. But Rachman is more real than Atkinson, more sympathetic than Tartt, less political than Shacochis, and far more believable than Pessl. He is only himself, in a novel that is far more integrated than his previous book, The Imperfectionists, and whose warm heart promises even more to look forward to in the future.