Booker shortlisted author of Europa

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

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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