THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT POWERS

At 20, she is wandering the streets of Manhattan with a scribbled-on map, living with a ping-pong-playing, avocado-loving Russian immigrant called Humphrey and scamming strangers for her shadowy protector, Venn.

Now, aged 31, she runs a second-hand bookshop on the Welsh borders and has found a kind of peace with her strange upbringing - until she gets a message from an old flame asking her to come back to New York to see her dying father.

Tooly has spent so much of her life becoming what others want her to be, she has lost all sense of herself. Warm, hilarious, moving and fizzing with intelligence, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers is a masterpiece about the search for identity, the people who rise into and fall out of our lives, and how to figure out what home means.

Tom Rachman was born in London in 1974 and grew up in Vancouver. His first novel, The Imperfectionists, was an international bestseller, published in more than 20 languages. Both novels so far have been feted by critics, who compared him to Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh and Anton Chekhov. He lives in London.