Richard Trench finds himself with no arms and no legs, reduced to a torso in the trunk of a car. There is a reason. It all makes sense. The point is there somewhere . . .

Imperfections elucidates the private lives of supermodels and circus freaks, sheiks and designer dominatrixes and the metamorphosis of the body chic. These are lives where the importance of vehicular mephitis-cide, a charity lobster boil for burn victims, a grilled-cheese sandwich with the face of the Virgin Mary toasted on it and a prophecy about the uncanny deaths of the voice-actors for Tigger and Piglet, can not be overlooked.

Set in the world of glittering photo shoots in exotic locations, extreme visions of beauty and raucous fashion shows, Imperfections is a genre-bending novel that sits solidly in the foggy area between fact and fiction.

Bradley Somer has written a ton of short fiction, which has appeared in a plethora of literary journals, reviews and anthologies over the past thirteen years. His stories show a bent for the off-kilter with a touch of the urban fantastic.
Bradley's debut novel, Imperfections, was published in Fall 2012 by Nightwood Editions. It earned a starred review from Quill & Quire magazine, won the 2013 CBC Bookie Award for debut author of the year and was one of the Canadian Bookseller's Top 8 Picks for 2012.
His next novel, Fishbowl, will be published in North America in August 2015 through St. Martin's Press. Publication rights have sold in eighteen countries and the book also will be available in many translations.

Bradley Somer's profile page

Imperfections is a wild send-up of the modelling industry and our obsession with the culture of beauty. Equal parts absurdism and societal critique, it is a comic romp on par with Mordecai Richler's Cocksure...Virtually every paragraph of Imperfections teems with authorial talent unafraid to show itself off.
--Mark Sampson, Quill & Quire

Perfection is something many desire, but no one achieves. Imperfections is a novel that explores the concept of perfection as Bradley Somer follows Richard Trench, who at a loss for limbs find himself in an adventure that is unlike anything he would have experienced with those limbs. Touching on the unusual, Somer seeks to look at the duality of beauty and ugly, and how the two aren't that far apart in what we week. With strong humor and much to ponder Imperfections is not a read to be overlooked.
--The Fiction Shelf, Midwest Book Review

[Imperfections] juxtaposes perfection and freakishness (ironically, the carnival freaks have been made freakish artificially); it explores what it is to live and not to have really lived; and it examines the ideas of predestination and fate. The paradoxes multiply: In one sense, events seem to occur utterly by chance--by fluke, even. But within the context of the novel, the threads seem interwoven.
--Event magazine