books in order

Tim Parks Books In Order

Morris Duckworth Books In Order

  1. Juggling the Stars (1990)
  2. Mimi’s Ghost (2001)
  3. Painting Death (2014)

Novels

  1. Tongues of Flame (1985)
  2. Loving Roger (1986)
  3. Home Thoughts (1987)
  4. Family Planning (1989)
  5. Goodness (1991)
  6. Shear (1993)
  7. Europa (1997)
  8. Destiny (1999)
  9. Judge Savage (2003)
  10. Rapids (2005)
  11. Cleaver (2006)
  12. Dreams of Rivers and Seas (2008)
  13. The Server (2012)
  14. The Prince (2014)
  15. Thomas and Mary (2016)
  16. In Extremis (2017)

Collections

  1. Talking About It (2005)

Non fiction

  1. Italian Neighbours (1992)
  2. An Italian Education (1995)
  3. Translating Style (1997)
  4. Italy (1998)
  5. Adultery and Other Diversions (1998)
  6. Hell and Back (2001)
  7. A Season with Verona (2002)
  8. Medici Money (2005)
  9. The Fighter (2007)
  10. Teach Us to Sit Still (2010)
  11. Italian Ways (2013)
  12. Where I’m Reading From (2014)
  13. A Literary Tour of Italy (2015)
  14. A Survival Skill (2015)
  15. Life and Work (2016)
  16. Calm (2017)
  17. Out of My Head (2018)
  18. Pen in Hand (2019)
  19. Dialogues on Consciousness (2020)
  20. Italian Life (2020)
  21. The Hero’s Way (2021)
  22. The Hero’s Way (2021)

Morris Duckworth Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Tim Parks Books Overview

Juggling the Stars

Morris Duckworth, an unhappy and poverty stricken English teacher in Verona, descends deeper and deeper into crime and violence as he moves from petty theft to a plot to kidnap a wealthy heiress who has fallen in love with him.

Mimi’s Ghost

Morris Duckworth is back newly married, wealthy, and employed, but just as discontented as ever. He can’t seem to get over the loss of his wife’s sister Mimi, but he should have thought of that before he kidnapped and killed her. Just as our unsavory hero is beginning to adjust to his new life, he visits Mimi’s grave on the ‘Day of the Dead,’ and the charming photograph of Mimi on the gravestone distinctly winks at him, which does not bode well for his latest scheme; exploiting poor African immigrants as cheap labor. Nor, for that matter, do lingering questions about Mimi’s demise or the ‘accidents’ to which all of Morris’s enemies seem so unaccountably prone.

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.

Shear

In the hallucinatory light and heat of a Mediterranean island, a geologist arrives to inspect a granite quarry where a worker has been killed in suspicious circumstances. Briefed in advance to write a damning report, he brings along his young mistress and pushes his wife and family to the back of his mind. But his blithe plans are disrupted by the arrival of the dead man’s widow, hell bent on revenge; a fax from his wife announcing her pregnancy; and a threatening dispute with the quarry owners. Conflicting messages and complex motivations abound until, from the dust and roar of quarry and stone mill, the jagged contours of a harrowing conspiracy emerge. By the time the home office instructs him to drop the case, it is too late. He has already stumbled into a web of blackmail, deception, and murder. ‘Shear, ‘ a geological term, occurs when ‘pressure is applied in at least two different and not diametrically opposite directions, ‘ and in Shear Tim Parks has created a shattering portrait of a man confronting multiple forces and mounting obsessions. At stake is his marriage, his affair, his career, the life of an unborn child, his own life, and the lives of innocent people. Inevitably, all decisions and choices will emerge as suspect. Even integrity can be ‘just a cover for escape.’

Europa

Jerry Marlow is on a coach hurtling from Milan to Strasbourg, even though he loathes coaches and everything they stand for:…
all the contemporary pieties of getting people together and moving them off in one direction or another to have fun together, or to edify themselves, or to show solidarity to some underprivileged minority and everybody, as I said, being of the same mind and of one intent, every individual possessed by the spirit of the group, which is the very spirit apparently of humanity, and indeed that of Europe, come to think of it, which this group is now hurtling off to appeal. Jerry, suffice to say, is not a team player not even when it comes to saving his own job. Together with a group of colleagues and students from the University of Milan, he’s off to the European Parliament to protest new Italian laws against hiring foreigners a cause which he opposes, appealing to an institution he’s not sure should exist. So why is Jerry on the coach in the first place? Because she is there the same she for whom Jerry left his wife and daughter and who has since broken his heart. The unnamed she in question is a beautiful French woman of course, a hellcat in bed it goes without saying, and an intellect of notable refinement naturellement. She was also unfaithful, and now they scarcely speak to one another. The rest of this dark and often savagely funny novel shortlisted for the 1997Booker Prize consists of one great Joycean rant, a stream of consciousness harangue that circles obsessively around sex, the treachery of she, and Jerry’s boundless misanthropy. In between we get glimpses of the bus and its motley cast of characters, including, most vividly, Vikram Griffiths, part Welsh, part Indian, with his nervous tics and his self consciously Welsh accent and his shaggy mutt, Dafydd. As one might deduce from the title, the dream of the new, unified Europe looms behind this tale like well, like a big, unwieldy metaphor, given expression in the form of Jerry’s affair. As a meditation on the continent’s future, the novel works surprisingly well, and though it initially takes some time to sort out the looping rhythms of Parks’s prose, the reader’s patience is repaid in spades. Mary Park

Destiny

‘ Christopher Burton, the protagonist of Tim Parks’s masterful new novel, is one of Britain’s foremost foreign correspondents, the acknowledged world expert on Italian affairs. Three months after returning to London with his Italian wife for an extended stay, Burton, while standing at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel in London’s Knightsbridge, receives a phone call informing him that his teenage son has committed suicide. Why, upon receiving this terrible news, does he immediately conclude that his marriage of almost thirty years is over? And why is grief so slow in coming? Burton feels his pious, mercurial wife may have given him his life in Italy, even his prestigious career, but she has also made his life impossible. Was their troubled son somehow the victim of their long, explosive love hate relationship? Looking back, Burton sees in his life a web of contradictions, unanswered questions, and confusions. And yet, this life has been his Destiny. Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destiny is a seamless, beautifully plotted story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity, at once romantic and callous, brilliant and blind. In Destiny, Parks offers us a searing account of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.’

Judge Savage

‘There is no life without a double life. And yet one grows weary…
‘ Recently promoted to the position of Crown Court judge jealous colleagues suggest it might be because he is black Daniel Savage decides at midlife that it’s finally time to settle down, foreswear philandering, and rededicate himself to his family. His career demands the most responsible behavior he must be above suspicion. But Savage has been leading a double life for far too long, and a young woman from his past who holds a secret that could ruin his career and marriage begins making mysterious calls to his house. As tangled lies are solemnly ironed out in his court, Judge Savage finds his own existence suddenly descending into a mess of violence and confusion, and attempts desperately to get a grip on his world in the face of increasingly certain disaster.

Rapids

‘Suddenly alone, you see the river’s horizon come to meet you. There’s a certain glassiness to it and as the roar of the rapid swells the water grows more compact, it pulls more earnestly. Above and around, the mountains are quite still. Already you are past the point of no return. You must choose your line.’ 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 but a leader, 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. Vince is no natural on the water but comes to relish the exhilaration of testing himself. He feels better for it. But the holiday cannot be entirely separated from the larger world. Rather than allowing them to forget their ordinary personalities, the dangerous river brings out qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provokes sudden conflicts, 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…
Rapids grippingly evokes the vertiginous thrill of entering a hostile environment, of being at the limit of control. Tim Parks’s latest novel is alive with the drama of the water and the fragility of the people it bears along.

Cleaver

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. It is the autumn of 2004 and Cleaver has recently enjoyed the celebrity attending his memorable interview with the President of the United States and suffered uncomfortable scrutiny following the publication of his elder son’s novelised autobiography. He flies to Milan and heads deep into the South Tyrol, fetching up in the village of Luttach. His quest: to find a remote mountain hut, to get beyond the reach of email, and the mobile phone, and the interminable clamour of the public voice. Weeks later, snowed in at five thousand feet, harangued by voices from the past and humiliated by his inability to understand the Tyrolese peasants, he relies on for food and whisky, Cleaver discovers that there is nowhere so noisy and so dangerous as the solitary mind.

Dreams of Rivers and Seas

‘For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by Dreams of Rivers and Seas, dreams of water’. Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son, John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning. A brilliant and controversial anthropologist, the nature of Albert James’ research, and the circumstances of his death, are far from clear. On top of this, John must confront his mother’s coolness, and the strangeness of the cremation ceremony that she has organized for his father. No sooner is the body consigned to the flames than a journalist arrives, determined to write a biography of the dead man. The widow will have nothing to do with the project, yet seems incapable of keeping away from the journalist. In Tim Parks’ masterly new novel, ‘India’, with its vast strangeness, the density and intensity of its street life, its indifference to all distinctions between the religious and the secular, is a constant source of distraction to these westerners in search of clarity and identity. To John, the enigma of his father’s Dreams of Rivers and Seas appears to be one with the greater mystery of the country.

The Prince

Robert M. Adams’s superb translation of Machiavelli s best known work is again the basis for this Norton Critical Edition. Accurate, highly readable, and thoroughly revised for the Second Edition, this translation renders Machiavelli s 1513 political tract into clear and concise English. ‘Backgrounds’ relies entirely upon Machiavelli s other writings to place this central Florentine in his proper political and historical context. Included are excerpts from The Discourses, a report from a diplomatic mission, a collection of private letters, and two poems from Carnival Songs. ‘Interpretations’ retains three of the previous edition s seminal essays while adding five selections by Felix Gilbert, Federico Chabod, J. H. Whitfield, Isaiah Berlin, and Robert M. Adams. ‘Marginalia’ is an eclectic collection of writings germane to both Machiavelli and The Prince. Of the eight selections represented, five of them are new to the Second Edition, including Pasquale Villari s comic portrayal of Machiavelli s first diplomatic post in 1499, Francesco Guicciardini s lofty rebuttal to Machiavelli, and a collection of Tuscan Sayings to further the reader s understanding of this timeless text. An updated Selected Bibliography is also included.

Talking About It

The title story of this collection, ‘Talking About It,’ presents two friends, George and Michael, meeting ritually in a pub every night after a game of squash. While George recounts his increasingly extravagant sexual experiences, Michael listens on, meditating on how to redeem his uneventful life. But one day, the tables turn, and Michael finds a way to transfix his friend’s attention with a very interesting story . Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium or the problems and pleasures of adultery, these stories reveal Tim Parks s deeply felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche and the dynamics of human relations. Tim Parks is the author of eleven novels, including Judge Savage, as well as travel memoirs, essays, and translations of Italian writers. His most recent work of nonfiction is Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence.

Italian Neighbours

In this deliciously seductive account of an Italian neighborhood with a statue of the Virgin at one end of the street, a derelict bottle factory at the other, and a wealth of exotic flora and fauna in between, acclaimed novelist Tim Parks celebrates ten years of living with his wife, Rita, in Verona, Italy. More than a travel book, Italian Neighbors is a sparkling, witty, beautifully observed tale of how the most curious people and places gradually assume the familiarity of home. Selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Italian Neighbors is a rare work that manages to be both a portrait and an invitation for everyone who has ever dreamed about Italy.

An Italian Education

Tim Parks’ first bestseller, Italian Neighbors, chronicled his initiation into Italian society and cultural life. Reviewers everywhere hailed it as a bravissimo performance. Now he turns to his children born and bred in Italy and their milieu in a small village near Verona. With the splendid eye for detail, character, and intrigue that has brought him acclaim as a novelist, he creates a fascinating portrait of Italian family life, at school, at home, in church, and in the countryside. This panoramic journey winds up with a deliciously seductive evocation of an Italian beach holiday that epitomizes everything that is quintessentially Italian. Here is an insider’s Italy, re created by ‘one of the most gifted writers of his generation’ Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Translating Style

A work of literary criticism, this text provides both an analysis of the literary style of some of the 20th century’s leading writers as well as an insight into the art of translation. Tim Parks is a novelist and professional translator and seeks to show through detailed analysis what it really means to translate literary style. Combining literary and linguistic approaches, the book proceeds, through a series of interconnected chapters, to analyze Italian translations of the works of Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, Henry Green and Barbara Pym. The concluding chapter which examines six passages in English and Italian without stating at the outset which is the original language. The aim is to show how a study of the differences between the two texts leads very quickly to an awareness of which was the original and of what was the essential problem it posed for the translator. Authors presented in the text include: Hemingway, Rosetta Loy, Antonio Tabucchi, Jack Kerouac, Alberto Moravia and Roberto Calasso. The aim of the book is to savour the extent to which any text is driven by the language in which it is written, even when it departs from standard usage, when it seeks to achieve the status of literature.

Italy

These tales take the reader far beyond a packaged tour of Italy to encounter the land of magical extremes. Meet sculptors, olive harvesters, art historians, cooks, and grandparents whose tales soar with opera and simmer with bribes. Funny, heart wrenching, and smart, this book reveals Italy, both ancient and modern.

Adultery and Other Diversions

In his essay ‘Maturity,’ Tim Parks, reflecting on that notoriously indecisive prince of Denmark, suggests that Hamlet’s problem was ‘not cowardice, or even thinking too much, but rather that thought is his chief pleasure.’ Indeed, Parks continues, ‘It is perhaps this that our culture will have no truck with, the idea that the greatest pleasure might come, not from consumption, or action, or doing good or passion, but merely, wonderfully, from the mind’s play with itself.’ Our culture may not appreciate the mind at play, but Tim Parks most definitely does. In Adultery and Other Diversions, he gives his own intellect free rein to cartwheel and skylark among a variety of subjects from the dangerous allure of adultery to the creative power of rancor. With each essay, Parks begins by grounding himself and the reader in a concrete experience a bus ride across Europe, for instance, or cleaning his daughter’s room, or translating an Italian novel into English then lets his mind loose to joyously observe, reflect, and comment on what it all means. In ‘Glory,’ for example, Parks recounts an arduous hike through the Italian Alps with his two young children and a family friend. Descriptions of the difficult terrain, his own complicated feelings about climbing a particular peak, his friend’s preoccupation with the Tour de France, his children’s games all dovetail gracefully to arrive, eventually, at his real point, the nature of their endeavor:Being an entirely mental quality, surfacing in nothing more concrete than a word, glory tends to be belittled, or viewed with some embarrassment in a world where technique and her accomplice, information, are assumed to hold sway…
. And yet despite her new boots Gore Tex lined and all the chocolate and mineral drinks, the creams for sores and plasters for blisters, young Stefi, I know, would never have climbed Monte Maggio on that third day had it not been for the flavour of certain words Crest Strider, Peak Dancer. Whether he is discussing the Dionysian nature of affairs, or drawing parallels between the society Plato commented on in hisRepublic and our own, Parks does so with wit, elegance, and the kind of unself conscious grace that a natural athlete brings to the game. Adultery and Other Diversions is a delight to read, and even better to think about afterwards exactly the sort of book a certain prince of Denmark would have loved. Alix Wilber

Hell and Back

Hell and Back offers a wide range of wonderfully challenging, always provocative reflections on literature and the art of writing. The lead essay on Dante sets the tone for the entire collection: erudite, contemplative, witty, and meticulous, it constantly offers new insights in The Inferno, that most celebrated of all poems. Mixing biographical background with astute literary detection, Parks writes also of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Henry Green, Salman Rushdie, Jose Saramago, Christina Stead, Giovanni Verga, and a dozen others. His essay on the art of translation he is, among other things, an eminent translator from the Italian is simply masterful.

A Season with Verona

After 20 years of living in Italy, Tim Parks, whom Joseph Brodsky, has called ‘the nest British author working today,’ spent a full year following the fortunes and misfortunes of the Verona football oops! Soccer club. Here is his rollicking report. Fro Udine to Catania, from San Siro to the Olimpico, traveling with the fans and the players from the tip to the toe of Italy, Tim Parks offers a highly personal account of his relationship with a country, its people, and its national sport. The fans, as always are accused of vulgarity, racism, and violence. The police are ambiguous, the journeys exhausting, the referees unforgivable, the anecdotes hilarious. In a world stripped of idealism and increasingly bereft of religion, Parks suggests that soccer offers a new and fiercely ironic way of engaging with the sacred.

Medici Money

THEIR NAME is a byword for immense wealth and power, but before their renown as art patrons and noblemen the Medicis build their fortune on banking specifically, on lending money at interest. Banking in the fifteenth century, even at the height of the Renaissance, meant running afoul of the Catholic Church’s prohibition against usury. It required more than merely financial skills to make a profit, and the legendary Medicis most famously Cosimo and Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’ were masterly in wielding the political, diplomatic, military, and even metaphysical tools that were needed to maintain their family’s position. In this brisk and witty narrative. Tim Parks uncovers the intrigues, dodges, and moral qualities that gave the Medicis their edge. Vividly evoking the richness of the Florentine Renaissance and the Medicis’ glittering circle, replete with artists, popes, and kings, ‘Medici Money is a brilliant look into the origins of modern banking and its troubled relationship with art and religion.

Teach Us to Sit Still

Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitlessjourney through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: abreathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parksanticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship betweenhis mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life asan intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Captivating and inspiring, Teach Us to Sit Still is an intensely personal and brutally honest story for our times.

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