Destiny

Description

'This novel is a dazzling and sustained tour-de-force... Destiny dissects the human comedy with equal measures of humanity and humour' - Irish Times Three months after returning to England, Christopher Burton, receives a phone-call at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel, Knightsbridge that informs him of his son's suicide. But why on receiving this terrible news, does Burton immediately decide that he must leave his Italian wife of thirty years standing? Why does he find it so difficult to focus on his grief for his son? Intensely dramatic, dark and, against all odds, hilariously funny, Destiny is a satisfying story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity. Parks gives us a frightening experience of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.

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 and Teach Us to Sit Still. 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.

This brilliant work fizzes with bleak humour and a crackpot energy... a powerfully affecting novel of married life and cultural incompatability... Parks is an exceptionally acute observer of modern life * Daily Telegraph * Tim Parks masterly new novel is... intellectually sophisticated, formally ambitious, and belongs to a cosmopolitan European tradition. But it is one that pays honour to the heart as well as to the mind * Sunday Times * Complex but captivating and exactly observed... A book to digest slowly and savour * The Times * A wilful, hypnotic novel... Destiny gleams with insights into the trade-off between the personal and the political... a stylish, ambitious novel of a life in freefall * Time Out * He can write, at will, like a modern Henry James, proceeding with composure through the labyrinth... Indeed, this is a novel that seems to exist on the brink, on the edge of insanity * Literary Review *