Europa

Description

Shortlisted for the Booker prize, Europa is a brilliantly comic and breathtakingly dark novel of obsessive love Discover Tim Parks' darkly funny and deeply prescient Booker prize-shortlisted novel about the European experience. A brilliantly comic and dyspeptic novel about an obsessive love gone sour. Europa follows Jerry Marlow, a middle-aged Brit teaching at an Italian university, as he and his colleagues embark on a coach trip to Strasbourg in order to petition the European Parliament for improved working conditions. Jealousy and revenge, passion and dread intertwine in one man's soul as he's trapped in the awful claustrophobia of the trip with a group of people he loathes - and the woman who broke his heart. 'The best thing about Europa is the voice Tim Parks conjures up- Marlow's wry, defeated reason keeps you turning the pages...reminding us that it is far easier to unite a sprawling continent than the few cubic metres that contain a human soul' Sunday Times

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, Cleaver, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and The Server. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.

"Europa is a full and rounded and very disturbing novel...guaranteed to intrigue and, more often than not, have you squirming and wincing." The Times "Sheer enjoyment... Doffing his hat to Joyce and Beckett, Parks really hits his stride" Mail on Sunday "The best thing about Europa is the voice Tim Parks conjures up: Marlow's wry, defeated reason keeps you turning the pages... A forlorn but seductive voice, reminding us that it is far easier to unite a sprawling continent than the few cubic metres that contain a human soul" Sunday Times "The triumph of the work is its discomforting portrayal of an agile mind hampered by the twin shackles of longing and disgust... Europa is that rare beast, a book which demands and withstands a second reading" Daily Telegraph