The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

The blub on the jacket makes this sound like a mystery but that is only because the story starts at the end and jumps around through three decades leaving blanks in the lives of the characters that are not fully colored in until the end.  We first meet Tooly as a young woman in 2011 doing her best to make no money at all in a small used bookstore in a sleepy village in Wales.  In 1988 she is ten, living with a quiet earnest man she calls Paul but is spirited away by a wild and free woman named Sarah and finally finds herself in the care of Humphrey, who appears to be a Russian intellect with great chess and ping-pong skills, and Venn, a mysterious man of the world.  In 1999, Tooly is sharing shabby digs with Humphrey but finds a useful pretend life among a nest of struggling students on the Columbia University campus.  Tooly, Humphrey and Sarah are all  waiting for Venn to re-enter their story. The unlikely events that lead to these fascinating characters sharing a life is gradually revealed as we, as readers, are invited to contemplate the nature of family, the purpose of wealth, and what choices we would make if all choices were possible.  Some of it is funny, much of the truth is hidden in pseudo-intellectual observations of the world,  at times nobody seems to be who they really are, and always there are books.  One of my favorite quotes:
"People kept their books, (Tooly) thought, not because they are likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past - the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had introduced a snooze on page forty."