Tim Parks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Hell and Back, Tim Parks reminds us just how exciting the essay form can be - turning his attention to classic authors like Dante, Borges and Leopardi, as well as various contemporary writers including Vikram Seth, W.G. Sebald and Salman Rushdie.

An invigorating discussion of general ills, this collection of autobiographical essays ranges over adultery and parenthood, ghosts and gods, fiction and football. Living in Italy seems to sharpen the author's prose and make him even more cleverly English. A splendid volume of fascinating belles-lettres'. Mail on Sunday.

A revelatory read with delightful cultural and literary references, Teach us to Sit Still by Booker-shortlisted author Tim Parks examines how the philosophy of 'sit still, relax and stop worrying' can be profoundly life-altering. â??Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh;

For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water. Just days after controversial anthropologist Albert James writes these elusive lines to his son John, he is dead.

One of Britain's outstanding novelists, Tim Parks is also a provocative, entertaining and accomplished essayist. This new collection's title is drawn from D. H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence, and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterised by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict.Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett or Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongs others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Machiavelli and the Medici.Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on that most serious tussle: World Cup football.

Overweight and overwrought, Howard Cleaver, London's most successful journalist, abruptly abandons home, partner, mistresses and above all television, the instrument that brought him identity and power.

Daniel Savage is a Crown Court judge. In this novel by Tim Parks the author offers a penetrating glimpse into the human condition when, through the judge's eyes, he observes that those with whom we have the greatest intimacy are suddenly the most frighteningly mysterious.

Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of Hellas Verona football club, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world's most beautiful cities and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character.

But like any place that's become home I hate it too."How does an Englishman cope when he moves to Italy - not the tourist idyll but the real Italy? When Tim Parks first moved to Verona he found it irresistible and infuriating in equal measure;

How does an Italian become Italian? In An Italian Education Tim Parks focuses on his own young children in the small village near Verona where he lives, building a fascinating picture of the contemporary Italian family at school, at home, at work and at play.

Three months after returning to England, Christopher Burton, receives a phone-call at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge that informs him of his son's suicide. But why on receiving this terrible news, does Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of thirty years standing?

A brilliantly comic, dark and dyspeptic novel about an obsessive love gone sour. Jealousy and revenge, passion and dread intertwine in one man's soul as he's trapped in the awful claustrophobia of a three-day coach journey across Europe with a group of people he loathes - and the woman who broke his heart.

The 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, in which a group of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, landing on the west coast of Sicily and advancing to its capital Palermo in a bid to liberate the island from Bourbon rule, is perhaps the defining moment of the unification of Italy, and a testament to the bravery, resilience and vision of the country's last condottiere. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary diaries and other first-hand accounts by the protagonists of the events, and interspersing them with his own penetrating remarks, best-selling author Tim Parks retraces the journey of the "Mille" through the ragged landscape of Sicily under the blazing summer heat, bringing back to life an entire world in all its intricate complexity. Along the way he revisits old controversies and provides answers to many unresolved questions - as well as offering a vivid commentary on the Italy of today.