Morris Duckworth has a dark past. Having married and murdered his way into a wealthy Italian family, he has become a respected member of Veronese business life. But it's not enough.Never satisfied with being anything short of the best, 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. All the great slaughters of scripture and classical times will be on show, from Cain and Abel, to Brutus and Caesar. But as Morris meets stiff resistance from the director of Verona's Castelvecchio 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 aging 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 closet. The shame of it is that Morris Arthur Duckworth really did not want to have to kill again. Tim...

'All Italy is here' Sunday TimesFrom the bestselling author of Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education and A Season with VeronaLonglisted for the Dolman Travel Book AwardIn 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.

A brilliant new collection of essays of writers and their craft by the man Joseph Brodsky has called ""the best British author working today"". In Hell and Back,Tim Parks, a celebrated novelist and master of the essay form, offers a wide range of wonderfully challenging, always provocative reflections on literature and the art of writing. In this new collection, Parks turns his attention to classic authors such as Dante, Leopardi, Borges, Beckett, and Christina Stead, as well as contemporary writers including Vikram Seth, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago, and Salman Rushdie, along with a dozen others. The lead essay on Dante sets the tone for the entire collection: erudite, contemplative, witty, and meticulous, it constantly offers new insights into The Inferno, that most celebrated of all poems. In Hell and Back, Tim Parks reminds us just how exciting the essay form can be.

'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...

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? 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. This is a highly personal account of one man's relationship with a country, its people and its national sport. A book that combines the pleasures of travel writing with a profound analysis of one country's mad, mad way of keeping itself entertained.

Bedevilled by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, he confronts hard truths about the relationship between the mind and the body, the hectic modern world and his life as a writer.Teach Us To Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking and improbably entertaining story of Tim Parks' quest to overcome ill health.

From Publishers WeeklyExpatriate Englishman Morris Duckworth, the conman, serial murderer and psychopath last seen in Juggling the Stars, is back, in the egregious effulgence of his evil and charmed life. What is a literary fellow like British author Parks (Europa) doing with a slime like Morris? Having fun, writing a wild and wacky thriller that's like sharing a roller-coaster ride with a suave maniac. Morris is an inspired mixture of loony self-regard and stupidity fueled by obtuseness. Having fatally dispatched Massamina (Mimi) Trevesan, the heiress he kidnapped in the first book, evaded the law and even ingratiated himself with Mimi's family, Morris is now married to her sister, the voraciously libidinous Paola. He's living in a luxury condominium in Verona, swanning around in his Mercedes and battling with his brother-in-law for control of the family wine company. What makes Morris so fascinating is his utterly amoral mindset. Far from suffering true guilt, Morris engages in consummate self-justification. He believes Mimi has forgiven him for her murder, which was merely a reaction "to extreme circumstances." Exhibiting unmistakable signs of schizophrenia, he "sees" Mimi and talks to her, often by car phone. It's Mimi, he thinks, who advises him to dispatch three new victims. Parks applies a wicked imagination to his ingenious plot, getting Morris into one farcically dangerous situation after another. One need not have read the first book to enjoy the frissons of suspense in this one, and readers will hope they haven't seen the last of Morris and his bizarrely lethal adventures. (Feb.) Forecast: It may be his very proflicacy (10 novels and three nonfiction books) that has kept Parks from establishing an identity on this side of the Atlantic. With the right breaks, this very funny novel could find a niche in the mode established by Elmore Leonard. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistA study of psychosis or a riveting ghost story? Just as scholars have debated this question in discussions of James' The Turn * of the Screw, so too may readers dissect Parks' latest mystery. The fortune-hunting Englishman, Morris Duckworth, misses his Italian Mimi, the great love of his life, an unfortunate development because he murdered her in a previous book and married her older sister, Paola. He can, strangely enough, clearly hear and see Mimi, taking solace in their telephone (cordless, of course) conversations as he awaits the death of her and Paolo's mother, a demise that will give him the 50 percent control of the family winery he has long desired. Hoping to finally earn genuine membership into the family that had spurned his courtship of Mimi, he views his brother-in-law Bobo's management of Trevisan Wineries as a mere detail to deal with once he's fully on board. Enter a flesh-and-blood "ghost" from the past that can implicate Morris in Mimi's death, and Parks' deeply dark humor unfurls as Morris takes Mimi's advice and commits yet another murder. Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*

A riveting white-water ride down a raging river in the Italian Alps, pitting people against Nature, in "the novel Tim Parks was born to write" (Sunday Telegraph, London). When 15 vacationers-six adults and nine adolescents-arrive in the Italian Alps to try their kayaking skills against the wild waters of the upper Aurino River, they have no idea what harrowing events await them. Among the group are the London banker Vince- recently widowed and trying to make sense of his life-and his teenage daughter Louise. Their hosts are Clive, an enigmatic but commanding leader, and his alluring but fragile girlfriend, Michela. Their lives intertwine over the next week in ways none could have foreseen, as they test their courage and varying abilities against the roaring waters, the rocks both seen and sunken, the endless treacherous logs, the flotsam and driftwood that become a liquid trap, as the threat of death accompanies them downstream. Rapids grippingly evokes the vertiginous thrill...

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.

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed.To read this book is to understand how much the...