The Perfect Man

'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.