Books by Tim Parks

'Delves into the very essence of being a fan, while seamlessly exploring Italian history, politics, culture and society,' GuardianIs Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states?

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power is derived from the family bank. This book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank.

From the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and Italian Ways, Italian Life is a particular reckoning with a beloved adopted country.

After delighting us with his novels and many volumes of non-fiction, Tim Parks - who is not only an acclaimed author and a translator, but also a celebrated literary essayist - gives us a book to enjoy, savour and, most importantly, reread."

In the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps a group of English canoeists arrive for an introduction to white water rafting. Rather than allowing them to forget their ordinary personalities, the dangerous river brings out qualities and failings in the group.

In Extremis is one of the most implacable, but also one of the funniest, novels about death and family you will ever read. Should he try to solve his friend's family crisis?In his most exhilarating book to date, Tim Parks explores how profoundly our present identity is rooted in our family past.

How do we find calm in our frantic modern world? The author - lifelong sceptic of all things spiritual - finds himself on a Buddhist meditation retreat trying to answer this very question. He recounts his journey from disbelief to something approaching inner peace and tackles one of the great mysteries of our time - how to survive this modern age.

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? This collection of provocative pieces tells what readers want from books and how to look at the literature we encounter in a new light.

Acclaimed novelist and critic Tim Parks has long been fascinated by the complicated relationship between an author's life and work. Dissatisfied with the dominant modes of reading he encountered, he began exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives. A In a series of provocative, incisive, and unflinching essays written over the past decade and collected for the first time here, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author's ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers' reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes far beyond aesthetic appreciation. A This original and daring collection takes us into the psychology of some of our greatest writers and challenges us to see with more clarity how our lives become entangled with theirs through our reading of their novels.

Morris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family he has long left aside the paperweight and the pillow to become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it's not enough.

Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians - conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants, this title captures what makes Italian life distinctive.

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.

Tim Parks - who was described in a recent review as "one of the best living writers of English" - has delighted audiences around the world with his finely observed writing on all aspects of Italian life and customs. This volume contains a selection of his best essays on the literature of his adopted country.

A black comedy of family life, by the award-winning author of "Tongues of Flame" and "Loving Roger". Raymond has gone mad. His family have planned their lives so carefully, and a family casualty is definitely not part of the equation. Will Raymond let them help him anyway?

A sequel to "Cara Massimina". Morris can't get over the Italian girl who eloped with him two years ago, but perhaps the dear, dead Mimi can't get over him either. Living in Verona and married to her sister, he hears Mimi's voice and sees her endlessly reincarnated face in Renaissance madonnas.

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.

Begins with a corpse and a chilling question: Why has nice, ordinary, affectionate Anna picked up a knife and murdered the man she insists she loves? Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize when first published, this novel illuminates the way love contains the seeds of vindictiveness and hate.

George believes that life is worth living only if it is happy, and that if someone he loves is suffering he should move heaven and earth to end that suffering. He will not accept that life is not destined to be pleasant, or that his marriage can be anything but ideal. Then a deformed baby is born.

Centred on a love story full of twists, turns and revelations, this novel explores a world of lost directions, wavering commitments and misplaced ambitions, as Julia's adventurous departure to Italy confronts her more mercilessly than ever with the problem of what she is to do with her life.

From Svevo, Saba and Joyce in Trieste to Borges, Rushdie and psychopathology, this collection of essays covers other subjects such as: Saramago, Sebald, Seth, Henry Green, Christina Stead, Leopardi, Verga, Montale, Sironi in Fascist Italy, Buzzati, Bateson and Neugeboren.

Drawing on anecdote and autobiography, Tim Parks explores various subjects, such as ghosts, Indian gods, Verona Football Club, adultery and the EC. The aim is to make the reader appreciate the relationship between intimate experiences and the larger world of ideas.

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. '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.

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.

Arising from a dissatisfaction with blandly general or abstrusely theoretical approaches to translation, this book sets out to show, through detailed and lively analysis, what it really means to translate literary style.