Tim Parks

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks moved to Italy in 1981. Author of eighteen novels, including the Booker-shortlisted Europa, Destiny, Cleaver, and more recently Painting Death, he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi. While running a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan, he writes regularly for the LRB and the NYRB. His many non-fiction works include, the bestselling Italian Neighbours and Italian Ways, a remarkable memoir on chronic pain and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still, the essay collection Where I’m Reading From, and The Novel: A Survival Skill, a reflection on the relationship between novelists, their writing and their readers. His most recent novels, Thomas and Mary: A Love Story (2016), which was excerpted in The New Yorker, and In Extremis (2017), were both published by Harvill Secker. His non-fiction book Out of my Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, was published by Harvill Secker in July 2018.

Recently, Tim has published two books of non-fiction, ITALIAN LIFE (Harvill Secker, 2020), and THE HERO'S WAY (Harvill Secker, 2021), and his next novel, HOTEL MILANO, is forthcoming from Harvill Secker in 2022.

Praise for THE HERO'S WAY (2021):

'Elegantly written, full of wit and charm, this is travel writing at its very best' Orlando Figes

'In the vast literature of the Risorgimento and indeed of travel, The Hero's Way is unique. Not a guide, not a memoir, not a historical account, but all these genres together, masterfully alternated thanks to a prose that is ironic, clear-headed, sometimes lyrical and on occasion moving.' Roberto Balzani, Il Sole 24 Ore

Praise for OUT OF MY HEAD: ON THE TRAIL OF CONSCIOUSNESS (2018):

'[A] brisk, chatty and light-hearted account of Parks’s encounters with neurologists and philosophers looking for the location of consciousness. Are there literally images in the mind? If not, where are they? Trained philosophers might prefer their own technical discussions of famous issues; lay readers will enjoy themselves.' Alan Ryan, New Statesman Books of the Year 2019

'"What is consciousness?" is one of the big unanswered questions of science and philosophy. [...] [Parks] is a terrific ambassador for curiosity, and greets each step in his intellectual journey with dogged insistence. He is insightful and very funny on the world of academia, highlighting how egos and professional biases can skew research programmes. [...] It forces you to ask why radical ideas are resisted. Yes, the spread mind theory sounds crazy but, as political matters attest, what we take for normal can sometimes be completely insane.' Irish Times

‘Parks is an extraordinarily lucid and productive essayist […] [H]is nonfiction book Teach Us to Sit Still (2010) is one of the best accounts of the nature and significance of meditation I’ve read written by anyone who doesn’t have faith in universal consciousness. Parks applies a similar methodology to Out of My Head: a particular – and very personal – incident in his own life, leads him to reconsider both his theoretical positions and his values, and eventually initiates a major change in his behaviour. […] Parks’s preoccupation – sharpened by his experience of meditation – remains one of literary mechanics: how do you calibrate the internal and the external, the thought and the felt? […] [He] makes an excellent point about what he calls the “internalist” position (that our picture of reality is just that: a subjective one, concocted by our brains), which is that it flatters our sense of our own importance, making of us creators of our own effectively unique worlds. Certainly, there has to be some explanation of why it is we’ve clung so doggedly to this view. […] Parks’s own fantastic journey into the human brain takes him to Heidelberg, where he interviews a trio of neuroscientists – but while his prose remains as Englishly empirical as ever, his methodology is that of phenomenology from beginning to end: a consideration of his own consciousness shorn of any assumptions about what has caused it.‘ Will Self, New Statesman

'An exceptionally witty and compelling look at the nature of consciousness [...] In tackling consciousness, the full frontal assault, as often practised by philosophers and, in a different way, by neuroscientists, can only get us so far. Tim Parks' new book is a refreshing attempt to creep up on the hard question obliquely; and to take the argument deeper into the very realm of our embodied experience than it usually goes. The result is lucid, witty and engaging: a deft philosophical juggling act providing, in an honourable tradition, more questions than answers. [...] A confessed outsider to both academic philosophy and neuroscience, Parks demonstrates the truth that sometimes the outsider sees most of the game. And he has done his homework. [...] Parks is not only excellent company, but a worthy debating partner. He is a delight to read.' Ian McGilchrist, The Tablet

'Consciousness is weighty philosophical and scientific ground, yet Parks plots a chatty, accessible path through impenetrable academic papers and conferences on his quest to understand more about being human. So chatty, in fact, he often has conversations with himself, making Parks an even more likable guide to these lofty concepts. He’s not afraid to question some of Manzotti’s more ridiculous ideas, and muses on everything from the meaning of a midlife crisis to the much-loved Pixar film Inside Out, in which five cartoon emotions battle for control of the heroine’s psyche. [...] For all his considerable restraint, even Parks ends up deep in theory by the end – although it sounds poetic in his hands. [...] A thoughtful quest to understand consciousness.' Observer

'Parks, who is best-known for his Toujours Provence-like memoirs of life in Italy, succeeds admirably in bringing difficult ideas down a level. Eleanora Gallitelli, his Italian partner, who accompanies him to a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg for research purposes, also helps. Gallitelli recently told me that she is deaf in one ear. The story of her sudden irreparable deafness — how her brain began to develop a mind of its own, playing tricks with spatial awareness and balance — is quite brilliantly told here. Parks writes well enough to appeal to the layman and the mind boffin alike. Out of My Head is pleasurably nutty, self-regarding and at times quite hilarious.' London Evening Standard

'By describing his efforts to understand the phenomenon of consciousness in the form of a candid and entertaining journal-cum-memoir, Tim Parks has made a difficult subject interesting and accessible. He is an amateur in this crowded field but he presents professional neuroscientists with some challenging questions.' David Lodge
 

Praise for IN EXTREMIS (2017):

‘A brilliant study, both psychological and physiological, of a male human being in late middle age: darkly funny, searingly honest, unputdownable’ David Lodge 

'This is what a novel should be - gutsy, moving, funny, tragic, true – and with a syntax to die for. Tim Parks is in a league of his own. He makes every other English author of his generation look lame. IN EXTREMIS, in exacting detail, depicts the naked truth of marriage and aging, sex and death, family. Brilliant, brutal and all too quick – like life.' Henry Sutton 

'IN EXTREMIS is simply spellbinding and quite unique in my reading experience; very funny and very existential, compact and chatty, complicated and raw. Every scene has a poignancy, everything is powerfully visual. The rich language flows in an unbroken rhythm, seamlessly connecting one moving episode after another. Parks has written a masterpiece!' Per Wästberg, Chairman of The Nobel Committee for Literature

'The tone of [In Extremis] makes the subject matter even more unsettling. Parks is a supreme ironist of a particularly English sort, a laconic whistler in the dark. How many novelists could get away with the sentence 'From the moment the Californian physiotherapist had slipped his subtle finger into my anus at the hotel in Amersfoort, I had fallen under a spell'?... One of the most impressive qualities of the book is the detail, the layering of patterns, that binds together the stream of consciousness that otherwise might threaten to sprawl... [Parks is] delightfully acute on the incidentals of modern life, from the tyranny of the mobile phone, whose intrusive beeps offer a soundtrack to the narrative, to the vagaries of British public transport. The precision of the writing underpins a series of set pieces... For a book about death, it is ultimately curiously uplifting, its message loud and clear: 'Choose life'.' Literary Review   

‘We know from the moment we start reading Tim Parks’s new novel that we are in for a particularly intense kind of experience… we as readers are brought fully into the experience of the protagonist making sense of the story as he goes along… It’s great fun, this writing about its own writing. It lights up the story and makes us care about a clever, self-conscious central character, not because of who he is, but for the way he wants to “possess” meaning, the particular way he describes things… Parks’s project [is lifted] head and shoulders above so many of the books turned out by similar writers of his age and stage – the seemingly endless parade of novels about white middle-aged men having doubts about themselves, sexually and intellectually, in a range of contexts and against a variety of political situations. Parks, by being funny, explodes all that… the risks taken In Extremis are exhilarating. This is a wonderfully written novel that draws us close to Thomas in spite of who he is, not, as a lesser author would have had it, because of how he’s been carefully curated to be.’ Guardian

'Tim Parks's brilliant new comedy is an invigorating twist on the male mid-life crisis novel... A very funny, very clever novel that shows with tremendous verve how life is so often a beleaguering collision between the absurd and the profound.' Daily Mail 

'A thrillingly unsentimental - thrilling because unsentimental - meditation on every aspect and orifice of the human body.' David Shields 

‘In Extremis is a novel about death and family and religious faith, about fidelity and infidelity, about the tension created by the awareness of what one owes to oneself and what one owes to others. It is intelligent, comic, sad and at times disturbing… Parks admirably explores emotional complexity… [He] is good on detail, good on hurried meals in bad restaurants, good on weather – always important in a novel… Parks has a remarkable talent for present the waywardness of thought… Good fiction makes you think and feel at the same time. This novel does that very well, at times comically, at times distressingly. There is hustle and bustle, but the most fully realised character is the mother slipping away from life, disturbingly present in memory.’ Scotsman

'It is, by any standards, extreme. Extremely good, extremely funny and extremely dark — but also extremely frank in the way it deals with some extremely difficult, not to say delicate, subject matter. From leaving his wife and starting again with a woman half his age, to confronting the death of his mother and having anal massage to relieve his pelvic pain and prostate problems, this story about a man in crisis is a brutal tour de force.' Evening Standard 

‘Parks’ prose is laconic and skilful: the past interweaves with the present in the narrator’s mind in a supple dramatization of consciousness.’ Financial Times

‘This honest, perceptive novel explores death and how profoundly our identity is rooted in family.’ Grazia 

'In Extremis is, by turns, funny, poignant and thought-provoking. Structured with subtle intricacy, superbly controlled and emotionally intelligent, this is a book to love.' UK Press Syndication 

'[A] tour de force of a man in crisis... often blazingly funny, full of squirmy physical comedy and weaselly shilly-shallying' Observer

Praise for THOMAS AND MARY: A LOVE STORY (2016):

'Magic... In this darkly funny work, Parks offers a story that doesn’t shy away from the complexity of relationships, and from the ineffability, indeed, impossibility, of the unmade decision... [He] resists the novelist’s temptation to provide a clean narrative arc. Real life is more complicated than that' Independent ****

'[A] poignant portrait, like stained glass; a rich picture made up of all the small stories that make up a marriage, that make up a life' Guardian

'[A] mordantly amusing, deeply sad novel... As this plainly written, vivid portrait of a marriage unfolds... in an emotional jigsaw told from various perpectives, but predominantly Thomas's, Parks builds up his picture. The staging posts of marital erosion are deftly handled... Treating his characters and readers as far too knowing to be short-changed or patronised, Parks is neither trite nor glib' Herald

'[Thomas and Mary's] story is all too familiar... Parks gets under the skin of these archetypes and makes them throb with sadness... [He] is an artist with words and works his magic here by modulating his tone to reflect subtly different moods... he deserves praise for plumbing the depths of the human heart' The Times