Tom Rachman did fairly well with his debut novel, The Imperfectionists — an international bestseller translated into 25 languages. You know, the usual. The University of Toronto grad is back with his follow-up, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which hit shelves on June 10.

His new novel presented several new challenges. Rather than being set in the international news media, a context with which he was very familiar, it is set all over the world: including Thailand, Italy, Ireland, New York and Wales.

“Some of those places I’d been and knew well, and others I hadn’t or didn’t know as well,” he says. “And in each case I went back to those places and researched them and even reported from them.”

It also sports a more traditional narrative than The Imperfectionists — following one character, Tooly. In addition, each chapter narrates a different period of Tooly’s life.

“You’re going back and forth to different stages of her life, from her 30s to her 20s to when she’s a kid,” he says.

“Parts of the book are set in the late 1980s, with this backdrop of the end of the Cold War and other bits around the year 2000 and then other parts are in the present.”

The result: Tooly’s story is set against the history of the past quarter century.

Rachman was born in London, England and raised in Vancouver, B.C. His love of literature and fiction developed, somewhat ironically, during his cinema studies at the University of Toronto. A combination of his circle of friends and his studies helped him nurture this new obsession.

During this time, he attempted his first pieces of short fiction and realized this, not film, was his storytelling medium of choice.

Following his graduation from U of T, he earned his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University and became a journalist in order to gain experience before writing his first novel.

This allowed him to study and work around the globe, places that included New York, Rome, India and Sri Lanka. Close to his 30th birthday, he quit his job at Associated Press in Rome and moved to Paris to write his first book.

When funds grew tight, he took up a post as an editor at the International Herald Tribune and continued working on his manuscript.

It paid off. In 2010, he published The Imperfectionists, an impressive debut that climbed bestseller lists and has sold film and television rights.