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Identity, friendship, and a long-hidden crime lie at the heart of Naeem Murr’s captivating novel about five friends growing up in a small 1950s Missouri river town. A contender for the Man Booker Prize, this exhilarating story beautifully evokes the extreme joys, as well as the dark and shameful desires, of childhood.
Young Rajiv Travers hasn’t had much luck fitting in anywhere. Born to an Indian mother who was sold to his English father for £20, Raj is abandoned by his relatives into the reluctant care of Ruth, an American romance writer living in Pisgah, Missouri. While his skin color unsettles most of the townsfolk, who are used to seeing things in black and white, the quick-witted Raj soon finds his place among a group of children his own age.
While the friends remain loyal to one another through the years, it becomes clear that their paths will veer in markedly different directions. But breaking free of the demands of their families and their community, as well as one another, comes at a devastating price: As the chilling secrets of Pisgah’s residents surface, the madness that erupts will cost Raj his closest friend even as it offers him the life he always dreamed of.
Taking us into the intimate life of small-town America, The Perfect Man explores both the power of the secrets that shape us and the capacity of love in all its guises to heal even the most damaged of souls.
"Starred Review. Murr takes a Faulknerian approach to his portrait of Pisgah, peopling it with minor characters whose eccentricities provide local color and shrouded gothic elements—one of which reverberates menacingly." - PW.
"Delineating a balanced chiaroscuro between the substantive themes of truth versus secrecy, loyalty versus betrayal, and, of course, good versus evil, Murr's vivid coming-of-age novel is a sumptuous tapestry teeming with hauntingly indelible characters." - Booklist.
"“[A]stonishing in its depth and insight. In prose that is both spare and excruciatingly vivid, Murr's warts-and-all portrayal of humanity haunts you long after you've turned the last page.” — Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants.
"[S]ucceeds in re-creating an entire world with a full spectrum of human emotions in a small Missouri town, as Faulkner did in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi." – The Times Literary Supplement (London).
"In Pisgah, [Murr] has created a fully fledged, self-contained world, with a vast array of characters, each quixotic and authentically flawed. . . . The Perfect Man succeeds because it's so impeccably well written." – The Financial Times (London).
"'Heartland Gothic' is the quickest way to describe Naeem Murr's new book, but it is as inaccurate as any shorthand for so defiantly unclassifiable a novel. The Perfect Man sits uncomfortably in its time period—the 1950s—and is not as Gothic as Murr encourages readers to expect. It isn't quite a coming-of-age story or an immigration saga, either, although the author seems to be attempting to wedge it into these categories as well." - The Washington Post.
"Murr, a bracingly straightforward writer whose flourishes are rare and subtle (a too-thin schoolteacher has “pale freckled skin sealed to her bones”), dexterously advances multiple story lines, overlapping them now and then with rich results." - The New York Times.
This information about The Perfect Man was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
This, Murr's third novel, won the British Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia. Available in some markets in hardcover, it was published as a paperback original in the USA in April 2007.
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