The Perfect Man

by NaeemMurr (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.15

  At the age of five, Rajiv Travers, the child of an Indian mother and English father, finds himself shipped off to America to the house of his uncle's mistress, Ruth. The small town Ruth lives in turns out to be as exotic and strange to Rajiv as he is to its inhabitants. His close friendship with four local children helps him settle into his new life, but also leads to his discovery of a terrible secret that shadows the whole community. Ultimately, the chidren's changing desires and shifting loyalties, and the personal failings- and secrets- of the adults around them lead to tragic consequences...The Perfect Man was winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $3.15

  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. Rajiv 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. One 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. As Rajiv tries to establish his place in a town besieged by what cannot be spoken, some of the people he encounters fail utterly in their humanity, bringing about horrific consequences. Others, like Ruth - and Rajiv himself - though hardly perfect, at least struggle to understand and accept not only what love gives, but what it exacts.