Hotel Milano

From the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted chronicler of Italy, a classic novel about a man's emotional reckoning in a changed world far from home 
 
Frank's reclusive existence in a leafy part of London is shattered when he is summoned to Milan for the funeral of an old friend. Preoccupied by this sudden intrusion of his past, he flies, oblivious, into the epicentre of a crisis he has barely registered on the news. 
 
It is spring, his luxury hotel offers every imaginable comfort; perhaps he will be able to weather the situation and return home unscathed? What Frank doesn't know is that he's about to make a discovery that will change his heart and his mind. 
 
Hotel Milano is a universal story from a unique moment in recent history: a book about the kindness of strangers, and about a complicated man who, faced with the possibility of saving a life, must also take stock of his own.

Hotel Milano is one of Tim Parks' most engaging and satisfying books

Tim Parks, a long-time resident in Italy, is an accomplished writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and this deft and affecting short novel combines his skills

A compelling mix of emotional introspection and pressing drama

Excellent and quietly devastating... While recent pandemic novels such as Sarah Hall's Burntcoat and Sarah Moss's The Fell gave us the claustrophobia and forced intimacy of the pandemic, Hotel Milano comes closest to evoking what it was really like to watch the world be redrawn in real time

Parks writes with an appealing wry elegance, and his quirky, erudite narrator finally finds solace not so much in the grand themes of European culture as in a shredded balloon stuck in a tree or the yellow beak of a blackbird

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan. 
 
Parks is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still, Italian Ways and Italian Life. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has won many awards for both his work in English and his translations from the Italian, which include works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Antonio Tabucchi and Niccolò Machiavelli.

From the bestselling writer of Italian Ways, Europa and The Hero's Way, a story set during the first days of lockdown in Europe, about the unexpected kindness of strangers and one man's emotional reckoning. 
 
Milan, 2020. Drawn abruptly from his reclusive life in London for a friend's funeral, Frank finds himself in the eye of a pandemic he had barely registered on the news. From the relative comfort of his balcony at Hotel Milano, he surveys the train station across the piazza, seeing the mad dash for the last trains, hearing the sirens and watching the police stop people in the street. He feels himself remote from it all. 
 
Then, one night, the sound of a child's footsteps leads him to discover a family sheltering secretly above him: a family who need his help. As the days pass, this reserved and difficult man begins to open himself to others. Faced with the task of saving a life, he must also take stock of his own.

Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna

The Hero's Way

A single page might contain a delightful mix of history, referencing accounts of the original journey...together with accounts of incidents that bring a smile to the reader's face... Tim Parks will remain a favourite author of mine

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan. 
 
 Parks is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still, Italian Ways and Italian Life. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has won many awards for both his work in English and his translations from the Italian, which include works by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Antonio Tabucchi and Niccolò Machiavelli.

'Elegantly written, full of wit and charm, this is travel writing at its very best' Orlando Figes 
 
In the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy's legendary revolutionary hero, fled Rome and led 4,000 of his men hundreds of miles through Umbria and Tuscany, then across the Apennines, Italy's mountainous spine, toward the refuge of the Venetian Republic. After thirty-two exhausting days of skirmishes and adventures, only 250 survivors reached the Adriatic coast. 
 
This hair-raising journey is brought vividly to life by bestselling author Tim Parks, who in the blazing summer of 2019, followed in Garibaldi's footsteps. A fascinating portrait of Italy past and present, The Hero's Way is a celebration of determination, creativity and desperate courage.

A Modern Fable of Loyalty and Betrayal

Italian Life

How does Italy actually work? The bestselling writer on Italian culture sets out to answer this question -- and the results are often surprising

‘The best interpreter of Italian ways in Italy’

‘Parks is more than just an effortless raconteur: he offers detailed cultural observation, witty yet eagle-eyed, of what makes Italians so Italian’

‘All Italy is here, its history, its character, its flaws’

Refreshingly brilliant... Parks skilfully shows how the rules and the maneuverings within Italian university life mirrors those at work in Italian society... illuminating and entertaining. When Parks takes his reader behind the scenes and into a murky world of favouritism and nepotism, back-scratching and back-stabbing, collusion and exclusion, his narrative cracks up a gear and becomes gripping

A satisfyingly truthful, entertaining and provocative comedy that lays bare Italy's difference, as a nation and as a joyful, warm, ever changeable people, tractable by temperament, immovably stubborn in its traditions

Few foreigners have written more or better about contemporary Italy than Park, and his familiarity with all things Italian makes for agreeable reading... Often humorous, it is also...a chilling fable about a country that still lives by habits and expectations laid down many decades ago

'Parks...offers detailed cultural observation, witty yet eagle-eyed, of what makes Italians so Italian' The Times 
 
How does Italy really work? 
 
When Valeria travels from hot, dusty Basilicata to begin her studies in a northern university town, she has little idea of the kind of education she will find there. Italian Life is her story, and that of the students and professors around her: a story of power and corruption, influence and exclusion, and the workings of a society where your connections are everything. 
 
Written with flair and insight, Italian Life joins Tim Parks' bestselling books about his beloved and paradoxical adopted country. It is a gripping, entertaining, behind-the-scenes account of how Italy actually happens, and the ways it can surprise those who know it inside out. 
 
 'A satisfyingly truthful, entertaining and provocative comedy' Daily Telegraph

On the Trail of Consciousness

Out of My Head

Bestselling author Tim Parks embarks on an entertaining quest to understand the theories of consciousness

With wit, humanity and insight… [Parks] tackles a question that the greatest philosophical and scientific minds have struggled with for centuries: what is consciousness?... Parks is an entertaining companion throughout

Consciousness is weighty philosophical and scientific ground, yet Parks plots a chatty, accessible path through impenetrable academic papers and conferences on his quest to understand more about being human. So chatty, in fact, he often has conversations with himself, making Parks an even more likable guide to these lofty concepts. He’s not afraid to question some of Manzotti’s more ridiculous ideas, and muses on everything from the meaning of a midlife crisis to the much-loved Pixar film Inside Out, in which five cartoon emotions battle for control of the heroine’s psyche... A thoughtful quest to understand consciousness.

Parks, who is best-known for his Toujours Provence-like memoirs of life in Italy, succeeds admirably in bringing difficult ideas down a level. Eleanora Gallitelli, his Italian partner, who accompanies him to a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg for research purposes, also helps. Gallitelli recently told me that she is deaf in one ear. The story of her sudden irreparable deafness — how her brain began to develop a mind of its own, playing tricks with spatial awareness and balance — is quite brilliantly told here. Parks writes well enough to appeal to the layman and the mind boffin alike. Out of My Head is pleasurably nutty, self-regarding and at times quite hilarious.

[A] fantastic journey into the human brain...Parks makes an excellent point about what he calls the "internalist" position (that our picture of reality is just that: a subjective one, concocted by our brains), which is that it flatters our sense of our own importance, making of us creators of our own effectively unique worlds.

By describing his efforts to understand the phenomenon of consciousness in the form of a candid and entertaining journal-cum-memoir, Tim Parks has made a difficult subject interesting and accessible. He is an amateur in this crowded field but he presents professional neuroscientists with some challenging questions.

An exceptionally witty and compelling look at the nature of consciousness... In tackling consciousness, the full frontal assault, as often practised by philosophers and, in a different way, by neuroscientists, can only get us so far. Tim Parks' new book is a refreshing attempt to creep up on the hard question obliquely; and to take the argument deeper into the very realm of our embodied experience than it usually goes. The result is lucid, witty and engaging: a deft philosophical juggling act providing, in an honourable tradition, more questions than answers... A confessed outsider to both academic philosophy and neuroscience, Parks demonstrates the truth that sometimes the outsider sees most of the game. And he has done his homework... Parks is not only excellent company, but a worthy debating partner. He is a delight to read.

Tim Parks considers midlife crisis, a Pixar cartoon and ‘spread mind’ theory in his thoughtful quest to understand consciousness....Consciousness is weighty philosophical and scientific ground, yet Parks plots a chatty, accessible path through impenetrable academic papers and conferences on his quest to understand more about being human

A lucid investigation into the nature of experience and its grounding in the brain. Many readers will delight in Parks’s vivid rendering of complex ideas. He has a masterful capacity to entertain theories of the nature of consciousness not as abstract objects of academic scrutiny but as living concerns. These concerns illuminate from within his personal reflections on meditation, love, age, and dreaming.

A brisk, chatty and light-hearted account of Parks’s encounters with neurologists and philosophers looking for the location of consciousness

Is my experience real? 
 
Or just a movie in my head? 
 
Am I no more than a super computer? 
 
You are your brain, neuroscientists tell us. Everything happens in there. Yet even the most sophisticated brain scan cannot tell us who we are. Nothing in our neurons remotely suggests the rich nature of our experience, the colours, sounds and smells that make up our lives. 
 
When Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness, he set on a quest that moves through one sparkling encounter after another to arrive at the deepest of questions: what stuff exactly is consciousness made of? And where is it? Inside or out? 
 
‘An exceptionally witty and compelling look at the nature of consciousness… Parks is a delight to read’ Iain McGilchrist 
 
‘[It has] wit, humanity and insight… Parks is an entertaining companion throughout’ Mail on Sunday

In Extremis

Tim Parks's greatest book to date: a searing, darkly hilarious and deadly serious novel about family, infidelity and mortality

The best novel I read this year was Tim Parks’s In Extremis, a frantic and minutely observed comedy of family, marriage, life and death. There is something in the synaptic twitch of Parks’s prose that brings us closer to the pressures and rhythms of a lived life than the work of any other contemporary writer I can think of

Nobody tells this sort of story better than Tim Parks, who has a gift, unrivalled among his contemporaries, for capturing the sheer rapidity with which unconnected trains of thought hurtle round and round in the human brain. The novel is a tour de force of high-voltage storytelling

Head and shoulders above so many of the books turned out by similar writers... Parks, by being funny, explodes all that. This is a wonderfully written novel that draws us close to Thomas in spite of who he is, not, as a lesser author would have had it, because of how he’s been carefully curated to be.

Tim Parks is a hugely talented writer, who deserves to be a good deal more celebrated than he is… thematically taut and compulsively paced.

Tim Parks’s brilliant new comedy is an invigorating twist on the male mid-life crisis novel… A very funny, very clever novel that shows with tremendous verve how life is so often a beleaguering collision between the absurd and the profound.

A frantic and minutely observed comedy of family, marriage, life and death. There is something in the synaptic twitch of Parks’s prose that brings us closer to the pressures and rhythms of a lived life than the work of any other contemporary writer I can think of

Blazingly funny, full of squirmy physical comedy and weaselly shilly-shallying

In Extremis is a novel about death and family and religious faith, about fidelity and infidelity… It is intelligent, comic, sad and at times disturbing… Parks has a remarkable talent for presenting the waywardness of thought… Good fiction makes you think and feel at the same time. This novel does that very well, at times comically, at times distressingly.

Beyond the fierce and questioning intelligence are both humour and artfully constructed and invariably gripping plots

This is what a novel should be - gutsy, moving, funny, tragic, true – and with a syntax to die for. Tim Parks is in a league of his own. He makes every other English author of his generation look lame. In Extremis, in exacting detail, depicts the naked truth of marriage and aging, sex and death, family. Brilliant, brutal and all too quick – like life.

In Extremis is simply spellbinding and quite unique in my reading experience; very funny and very existential, compact and chatty, complicated and raw. Parks has written a masterpiece.

A thrillingly unsentimental—thrilling because unsentimental—meditation on every aspect and orifice of the human body.

A writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill...tremendously readable

An exceptionally acute observer of modern life

In Extremis is by turns funny, poignant and thought-provoking. Structured with subtle intricacy, superbly controlled, and emotionally intelligent, this is a book to love

The Parks remains one of Britain’s most seriously under-celebrated novelists… In Extremis is often hilarious… The humour, clever asides, effortless plotting, astute characterisation, sense of everyday chaos and compelling readability will come as no surprise to his seasoned readers, yet the telling achievement of what is his finest book to date lies in its unexpected tenderness and beauty… Intuitive and humane, funny and sad – as real as life and death, as is Thomas Sanders, warts and all. This likely Man Booker contender is a British novel possessed of a sophisticated European resonance

The dreamlike quality of the stories in Men Without Women is undoubtedly one of its chief attractions… Murakami’s womenless men live in perpetual daydreams, a state of mind often prompted by a loss of some kind… Murakami’s latest is a hypnotising study of male loneliness

Potent storytelling and a generous cast of minor yet memorable characters… make for a helter-skelter read that’s clever, comic and pulsing with humanity

Thematically taut and compulsively paced.

A very good novel of anxiety, embarrassment and also, somehow, the depths of Englishness.

Thomas needs to speak to his mother before she dies. 
 
But he's set to give a talk to a conference of physiotherapists in the Netherlands; if he leaves now will he get to her deathbed in time? 
 
Will he be able to say what he couldn't say before? He can't concentrate on what is happening now: his mind won't sit still. Should he try to solve his friend's marital crisis? Should he reconsider his separation from his own wife? And why does he need to pee again? 
 
In Extremis is Tim Parks's masterwork: a darkly hilarious and deadly serious novel about infidelity, mortality and the frailties of the human body.

Vintage Minis

Calm

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh; it made me cry; and it made me seriously think about taking up Vispassana meditation

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? Tim Parks – lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. With brutal honesty and dry wit, he recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time – how to survive in this modern age. 
 
Selected from the book Teach us to Sit Still by Tim Parks 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Swimming by Roger Deakin 
Motherhood by Helen Simpson 
Work by Joseph Heller 
Liberty by Virginia Woolf

Rapids

A thrilling adventure story set in the Italian Alps involving group politics, a love affair and white water rapids in another critically acclaimed novel by the masterful Tim Parks.

A near-perfect marriage of style and content...A terrific, bravura tale...has a magnificent, thrilling urgency

A deftly plotted tale...With Rapids, Tim Parks demonstrate, once again, that he is a supremely confident storyteller...As refreshing as it is memorable

Triumphant...In Rapids he has excelled himself

A writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill...His work is always tremendously readable

A truly outstanding writer... immensely readable and deeply intelligent

Parks is a writer of technical brilliance and ambition, whose fiction has been getting better and better...Written with a compelling urgency and energy...It is thrillingly paced

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.

In the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps a group of English canoeists arrive for an 'introduction to white water.' Camping, eating and paddling together, six adults and nine adolescents seem set to enjoy what their leader insists on calling a 'community experience.' Their hosts are Clive, a taciturn figure, and Michela, his fragile girlfriend. Joining the group late are Vince, a banker trying to make sense of the flotsam of his existence, and his teenage daughter whom he feels moving inexorably away from him. 
 
The dangerous river manages to bring out the group's qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provoking sudden conflicts and unexpected shifts of alliance. An ideal love affair breaks down and an apparently impossible one timidly buds. A banal disagreement turns violent. Meanwhile, the hottest summer on record is filling the glacier-fed rivers with a melt water so wild that it is surely unwise of the distracted instructors to launch their party into the last day's descent of the upper Aurina...

A Love Story

Thomas and Mary

A blackly comic novel about the dissolution of a long marriage, from the bestselling author of Teach Us To Sit Still

In this darkly funny work, Parks offers a story that doesn’t shy away from the complexity of relationships, and from the ineffability, indeed, impossibility, of the unmade decision.

Mordantly amusing, deeply sad novel… Plainly written, vivid portrait of a marriage… A cautionary tale for couples heedless of the care and kindness a good relationship requires, and a horror story for those who discover they are simply but irreparably mismatched.

A blackly comic study of a 30-year-old marriage.

As effective an antidote to Valentine’s Day as you could find.

Restless, lightly mordant tale of lust and love lost.

A subtle and painfully well-observed black comedy that will make some readers flinch with recognition.

This forensic account of marital breakdown is breathtakingly honest… There are moments in Thomas and Mary…that will make anyone in a long-term relationship wince.

Parks’s observations of family life are warm and funny.

A serious and penetrating study, always drilling down to the fundamentals, of family, love and middle-aged ennui.

It’s a poignant portrait, like stained glass; a rich picture made up of all the small stories that make up a marriage, that make up a life.

Tim Parks is a writer with acute perception of human nature.

Tim Parks, always sharp on domestic details… is good on the subtleties of office politics. And good on stormy passion, too.

‘Somehow it seemed to him the only thing that would really solve the problem would be to return to the sea and find the old ring with their names and the wedding date engraved inside, in 22-carat gold, and put it on again and then the world would magically return to what it had been before. Many years before. 
 
This did not happen.’ 
 
Thomas and Mary have been married for thirty years. They have two children, a dog, a house in the suburbs. But after years of drifting apart, things – finally – come to a head. 
 
In this love story in reverse, Tim Parks recounts what happens when youthful devotion has long given way to dog walking, separate bed times, and tensions over who left the fridge door open. 
 
Lurching from comedy to tragedy, via dependence, cold re-examination, tenderness and betrayal, Thomas and Mary is a fiercely intimate chronicle of a marriage – capturing the offshoots of pain sent through an entire family, when the couple at its heart decide it’s all over.

The Changing World of Books

Where I'm Reading From

What do books mean to you? A lively and enjoyable book about books, from bestselling writer Tim Parks

A book about reading that only makes you want to read more and a book about writing that needs to be read

Parks has the ability to make other writers seem not just enriching but exciting as well

This book will make you think about what and how you read

Insightful, provocative, funny and frightening, this wry, fast-paced and passionate series of essays encourages us to re-evaluate our perception of reading and books

Stimulating and genuinely thought-provoking collection of pieces.

Should you finish every book you start? 
 
How has your family influenced the way you read? 
 
What is literary style? 
 
How is the Nobel Prize like the World Cup? 
 
Why do you hate the book your friend likes? 
 
Is writing really just like any other job? 
 
What happens to your brain when you read a good book? 
 
As a novelist, translator and critic, Tim Parks is well-placed to investigate any questions we have about books and reading. In this collection of lively and provocative pieces he talks about what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light. 
 
These pieces were originally published as columns in the New York Review of Books.

Painting Death

The horrifying and entertaining tale of an unrepentant bourgeois serial killer, Morris Duckworth, and his adventures in Veronese high society.

Sharp, funny and satirical… This is one to relish

Neatly written, full of calamitous moments in which the comedy is suddenly elbowed aside by genuine emotion

Hovering adroitly between tragedy and farce...a good novel to savour by the pool in Tuscany this summer

Duckworth is a worthy heir to a tradition of seductive, cultured literary monsters that includes Humbert Humbert, Hannibal Lecter and John Lanchester's Tarquin Winot

From the bestselling author of Italian Ways and Italian Neighbours comes a darkly comic new novel of murder in Veronese high society 
 
Morris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family he has now become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it’s not enough. He comes up with a plan to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing. But as Morris meets stiff resistance from the director the museum, everything starts to unravel around him. His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her ageing confessor, and worst of all it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around him, and the skeletons rattling in every cupboard…

Cara Massimina

Introducing unrepentant bourgeois serial killer Morris the Duckworth and his adventures in Veronese high society.

Sharp and witty, expertly paced, frequently horrific and often very funny

An unusually classy thriller, true to life and not to be missed

Tim Parks presents the real, virginal, boastful, cracked Morris lurking behind his own justifications as matters turn lethal and ugly. Clever, blandly humorous and utterly immoral

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.

Bored and broke, Morris Duckworth, an English teacher in Verona, stumbles on a plan for financial salvation – to marry Massimina, one of his lovelier students. 
 
And if his intentions are frustrated by a suspicious, conservative family, is it any fault of his that the girl chooses to elope? 
 
Obsessed by self-advancement and excitement, Morris’s dreams of blackmail, theft and murder plunge him deep into a chilling nightmare of deception and violence.

Mimi's Ghost

A thrilling comedy, as dark as it is farcical - the horrifying and entertaining tale of an unrepentant bourgeois serial killer, Morris Duckworth, and his adventures in Veronese high society

A triumph of the darkly-comic-thriller-and-something-more-besides genre

A sort of twisted whodunnit… The readability of the book comes from Parks’s wonderful and audacious juggling of farcical situations and the way in which Morris’s earnest attempts to build a more cultured and just world lead him further and further into slaughter. Hilarious.

Cara Massimina was a triumph of the darkly-comic-thriller-and-something-more-besides genre. This is an even greater one

Morris Duckworth can’t get over Mimi. 
 
But maybe he should have thought of that before he murdered her and married her sister. 
 
Now Mimi’s back as a ghost, and she seems to be suggesting the way to redemption for Morris. And if anybody should get in his charitable way, then so much the worse for them.

On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Italian Ways

A journey around Italy by train, full of humorous and insightful observations on what the railways and their travellers reveal about the country

All Italy is here, its history, its character, its flaws

A treat equivalent to a ride on the Orient Express

Like the best train journeys, you don’t want it to end

A very funny hosanna to Italian railroad locomotion in all its rackety glory

Parks has the keenest of eyes for the telling of amusing detail ... He remains the best interpreter of Italian ways in Italy

Tim Parks has written a book about Italian railways that is engrossing, entertaining, and wonderfully revealing about the country and its people. It makes perfect armchair travelling – a delight from beginning to end

All Italy is here, its history, its character, its flaws, and some of the things that Parks loves about the place

The book is, as Tim Parks says, a search for the Italian character, which he evokes in dozens of gorgeously written scenes; but beyond that Parks is exploring the dynamic between tradition and innovation... Underneath everything, Parks is trying to come to a point of loving the world in all its confusion and frustration, and by the book's end he does, he does. Bravo

This latest peg on which to hang another ruminative book about the character of Italy provides Parks with a first-class ticket to ride as a lively, erudite raconteur in salty daily negotiation with what he calls a ‘dystopian paradise’

With Paul Theroux apparently winding down, there might be an opening for Parks as a new laureate of international railways

Parks is also a railway enthusiast and this delightful book is the story of his love-hate relationship with Italian trains

This is not a “railway book” in any conventional sense. It is sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued about the absurdities of ‘Italian ways’

Over thirty years living among the Italians, [Parks] has developed an acute eye for their idiosyncrasies and, over the course of three previous books on Italy, he has created a style sharp and subtle enough to evoke them… As an inglese italianizatto insider-outsider he brings an ideal dual perspective… It is this double vision (along with his superb style) that elevates Parks’s books way above other recent Anglo-Saxon portraits of Italy… [it] adds in turn to the long tradition of excellent English writing on Italy established by Hazlitt, Lawrence and Norman Lewis

Compelling… Parks conveys a detailed, dense, oppressive sense of the inadequacies and idiosyncrasies of the national rail system…but Parks’s railway system in the end links families, reuniting Italian mamas with prodigal sons, and provides a wonderful space for the earwigging of intimate arguments conducted, as ever, on the telefonino

Tim  Parks’ detailed descriptions will leave you rocking to the thrum of the  tracks, and come dotted with his often bizarre but always comical  experiences en route

A hybrid of travel and cultural history…and very amusing it is too… Parks has done Lecce and all Italy proud in this eccentric hosanna to railroad locomotion

Italian Ways gracefully tells you an enormous amount about Italy and its trains. Parks is also very funny, a master of the dry aside

An entertaining look at Italian railways, the people who run them and the people who travel on them… Wry, thoughtful, funny, serious and cleverly capturing the essence of modern Italy, it is perfect armchair travelling

Tim Parks embarks on his Italian train odyssey with humour, grim patience, and a great novelist’s insight…full of hilarious anecdotes and insight from a true Italophile

Parks is one of the best living writers of English, and this book is so good you don't want it to end

If, like me, you relish Italy, railways and grumbling, this is the most transporting book

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona and Teach Us to Sit Still. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.

‘All Italy is here’ Sunday Times 
From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with Verona 
Longlisted for the Dolman Travel Book Award 
 
In 1981 Tim Parks moved from England to Italy and spent the next thirty years alongside hundreds of thousands of Italians on his adopted country’s vast, various and ever-changing networks of trains. 
 
Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants – Tim Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive. He explores how trains helped build Italy and how the railways reflect Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond.

Sex is Forbidden

A gripping and perceptive novel about the trials of self-discovery by one of our most highly acclaimed writers.

It's a cracker - clever, funny and insightful, with complicated, conflicted and totally convincing Beth at heart

Parks writes with detachment, wit and intelligence, and the troubled voice in Beth is entirely convincing

A wry and subtle story about what happens when the western self tries to lose itself.

An eminently readable and thought-provoking novel that teases you to the last page, and possibly beyond

The Dasgupta Institute...is sharply observed, a surprisingly dystopian environment of gender segregation and enforced privation

Tim Parks' new novel addresses in fiction a milieu and a theme that he explored, with great success, in his memoir Teach Us How to Sit Still

Entertainingly dramatizes the conflict between seeking tranquility and expressing one true’s self

Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. So what is the sparkling, magnetically attractive Beth Marriot doing here? Beth is fighting demons: a catastrophic series of events has undermined all prospect of happiness. Trauma leaves her no alternative but to bury herself in the austere asceticism of a community that wakes at 4am, doesn't permit eye contact, let alone speech, and keeps men and women strictly segregated. But the curious self dies hard. Conflicted and wayward, Beth stumbles on a diary and cannot keep away from it, or the man who wrote it. 
 
Originally published with the title The Server

Stop What You're Doing And Read This!

A mission statement about the transformative power of reading; about the way it inspires us, the tangible impact it can have on our wellbeing, the importance it holds for us now and will continue to hold in the future.

A strong argument for making "reading more" one of your new Year's Resolutions

Not having enough time to read is a common complaint. But as this collection of essays by ten committed bibliophiles attempts to show, reading should be an activity as regular as brushing your teeth

Ebullient... Subtle... Inspiring and impassioned... This advocacy for intense reading is punchy and sharp

A delightful collection of essays from luminaries of the book world... Some are personal, some political, but all are passionate

In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams. 
 
Why should you stop what you're doing and read a book? 
 
People have always needed stories. We need literature - novels, poetry - because we need to make sense of our lives, test our depths, understand our joys and discover what humans are capable of. Great books can provide companionship when we are lonely or peacefulness in the midst of an overcrowded daily life. Reading provides a unique kind of pleasure and no-one should live without it. 
 
In the ten essays in this book some of our finest authors and passionate advocates from the worlds of science, publishing, technology and social enterprise tell us about the experience of reading, why access to books should never be taken forgranted, how reading transforms our brains, and how literature can save lives. In any 24 hours there are so many demands on your time and attention - make books one of them. 
 
Carmen Callil Tim Parks 
Nicholas Carr Michael Rosen 
Jane Davis Zadie Smith 
Mark Haddon Jeanette Winterson 
Blake Morrison Dr Maryanne Wolf &amp; Dr Mirit Barzillai

Shear

Tim Parks is the author of seven novels, including Tongues of Flame (winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards), Loving Roger (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and most recently Goodness. He has just completed a new novel, Mimi's Ghost. He has lived in Italy since 1981 and is married to an Italian. Italian Neighbours, his non-fiction account of suburban life in Italy, has been variously described as 'tough, funny and sceptical', a rich treat from start to finish' and 'a travel book with a rare sense of purpose'. 
 
Apart from his own writing, Tim Parks is the translator of such authors as Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi and Roberto Calasso.

An English geologist working on a Mediterranean island becomes embroiled in a nightmare web of deceit, corruption, lust and tragedy in Tim Parks' mesmeric story of a man whose life will be shattered like the fatal fragment of stone that obsesses him.

Family Planning

Tim Parks's other novels include Tongues of Flame (winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards), Loving Roger (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Cara Massimina, Mimi's Ghost and Europa. His non-fiction work includes the bestselling Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. Tim Parks lives in Italy.

Raymond is mad, clever, manipulative and totally out of his parents' control. The other children are lying low, though still inextricably attached to their father's purse-strings. Amidst hilarious misunderstandings and poignant inadequacies, six well-meaning people relentlessly engineer their own and their loved ones' downfall.

Loving Roger

A brilliantly concise investigation of how the trials of a relationship can spill over into violence.

With his chillingly elegant prose and frighteningly deadpan narrative, Tim Parks has written, not a whodunnit, but a brilliant whydunnit.

Winner of Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham Awards, Tim Parks has been described as 'among his generation's most gifted writers', 'a writer to watch' and 'the best British author today'.

Tight and disturbing, Loving Roger begins with a dead body and a chilling question. Why has nice, ordinary, affectionate Anna picked up her kitchen knife and murdered the man she insists she loves?... This brief novel is a mordantly illuminating essay on the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hatred'' Observer.

Goodness

George Crawley has finally got his life running along satisfyingly straight lines. Having made a success of his career and saved his faltering marriage, he is secure in the belief that he is master of his own destiny. Then comes the tragic blow - fate presents him with an apparently insoluble problem. Except that the word 'insoluble' just isn't part of the man's vocabulary. George will stop at nothing, nothing, to get his life back on the rails again.

Home Thoughts

Tim Parks's other novels include Tongues of Flame, which won the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards, Loving Roger, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Cara Massimina, and Mimi's Ghost. His non-fiction work includes the bestselling Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and Adultery &amp; Other Diversions. His ninth novel Europa was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize. His most recent novel is the acclaimed, Destiny. Tim Parks lives in Italy.

Julia has left home. She has gone to Italy. She has left her lover, her job, her flat, the closely-knit group of friends who meant so much to her. Why? And the motley group of ex-pats she finds in Verona, the Oxbridge brigade, the revolutionary Scot, the cool Canadian, the feminist Flossy - why do they find it so impossible to return home, as if their very identities depend somehow on this thousand-mile displacement? Centred around a love story full of twists, turns and revelations, Home Thoughts explores a world of lost directions, wavering commitments and misplaced ambitions as Julia's adventurous departure confronts her more mercilessly than ever with the problem of what on earth she is to do with her life.

Tim Parks

Tim Parks is one of those writers whose name on the cover is more or less a guarantee of a good time for the reader. His books are chewy, original and entertaining.

Quicksilvery syntax slips through this compelling story of desire and loss

It is such a pleasure for the reader to follow the artful, layered, unfolding of this man's journey into his own heart and past.

Mr Geography delights and surprises to the end: a reminder to us all, regardless of age or profession, that there’s more than one route through life

A sustained exploration of the extraordinary grip that the defining sexual and romantic moments from our past can continue to have on us… the results are delightfully disorienting

[A] sophisticated novel about a retired teacher holidaying solo in the Alps… Past and present swirl in an engrossing helter-skelter as he mulls over a life’s turning points

Daniel Burrow once began a beautiful walk from Konstanz to Como with Julia, mercurial professor of literature, mother to two of his pupils, married, and the love of his life. 
 
After years of their secret affair, they stepped out together on top of the world, full of delight in one another and in the future they imagined. Or was it only Dan who imagined it, really? He never had the chance to find out, because a few days into their adventure a single phone call changed everything. 
 
Now, at the height of summer, with only a rucksack, a few pages of DH Lawrence that had been Julia’s, and his private strata of memory and forgetting, Dan is back on the trail. Step by step, with a tumult of emotions jostling with the demands of the dramatic Alpine landscape, he reckons with what his life is and what it might have been, had he been a different man with different choices. 
 
'A writer operating at the height of his powers. One follows the twists and turns of this story of discovery and self-discovery in a sustained state of delight' J.M. Coetzee 
 
'An intensely satisfying novel, superbly crafted' Nicholas Shakespeare 
 
'Parks is a prolific writer and Mr Geography is one of his finest books, matching virtuoso technical skill with deep emotional resonance' The Tablet

Tim Parks

Praise for Mr Geography

Tim Parks is one of those writers whose name on the cover is more or less a guarantee of a good time for the reader. His books are chewy, original and entertaining.

Quicksilvery syntax slips through this compelling story of desire and loss

It is such a pleasure for the reader to follow the artful, layered, unfolding of this man's journey into his own heart and past.

Tim Parks is one of those writers whose name on the cover is more or less a guarantee of a good time for the reader. His books are chewy, original and entertaining.

Quicksilvery syntax slips through this compelling story of desire and loss

It is such a pleasure for the reader to follow the artful, layered, unfolding of this man's journey into his own heart and past.

Tim Parks is one of those writers whose name on the cover is more or less a guarantee of a good time for the reader. His books are chewy, original and entertaining.

Quicksilvery syntax slips through this compelling story of desire and loss

It is such a pleasure for the reader to follow the artful, layered, unfolding of this man's journey into his own heart and past.

Books by Tim Parks

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