Bøker av Tim Parks

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

Promoted young to the position of Crown Court Judge - because of his ability, but perhaps also for certain questions of political convenience - it's time for Daniel Savage to settle down. Day by day Judge Savage presides over those whose double lives have been exposed.

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.

The gift of tongues, prophecy exorcism. . . what might such concepts mean in a complacent backwater of North London? For Richard Bowen, adolescence becomes a nightmare when his parents join the charismatic movement and find a devil in his brother. Winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards.

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.