Community On Same Page at Reading Event

The Friends of the hope reading “The Imperfectionists’’ will make for a perfect community event.

The book is the selection of the annual book read, to be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 13 at the , Wheeler Road.

The discussion will be led by Helen Whall, a professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. She has written about Shakespeare and modern drama as well as detective stories and popular culture and is a frequent lecturer throughout the Massachusetts’ library system.

In his debut novel "The Imperfectionists," young Amercian author Tom Rachman takes the reader to Rome of the 1950s through every decade to the 21^st century. Contemporary chapters alternate with those chronicling the stories of men and women who, in the earlier decades, worked for an English-language international newspaper.

The oldest of them pass from view, the youngest grow old still working for a paper that has watched the "news" move from print to screen. Rachman's narrative mode effectively captures the movement of life-times and the importance of memory.

Readers may at first think he has just interlinked a series of short character studies, but the person who lives through this novel will discover at the end what  readers only hope we discover at our own ending: It all makes a mysterious kind of sense.

Reserved copies of “The Imperfectionists’’ are at the Grafton Library. Those participating are encouraged to reserve a copy soon.