From the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted writer of Italian Ways and Europa, a classic novel about a man\"s emotional reckoning in a changed world far from home Frank\"s reclusive existence in a leafy part of London is shattered when he is summoned to Milan for the funeral of an old friend....

Is my experience real? Or just a movie in my head? Am I no more than a super computer? You are your brain, neuroscientists tell us. Everything happens in there. Yet even the most sophisticated brain scan cannot tell us who we are....

Thomas needs to speak to his mother before she dies. But he\"s set to give a talk to a conference of physiotherapists in the Netherlands; if he leaves now will he get to her deathbed in time? Will he be able to say what he couldn\"t say before? He can\"t concentrate on what is happening now: his mind won\"t sit still....

In the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy\"s legendary revolutionary hero, fled Rome and led 4,000 of his men hundreds of miles through Umbria and Tuscany, then across the Apennines, Italy\"s mountainous spine, toward the refuge of the Venetian Republic....

How does Italy really work? When Valeria travels from hot, dusty Basilicata to begin her studies in a northern university town, she has little idea of the kind of education she will find there....

In 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....

How have the modern world, technology and our addiction to information changed who we are? What effect does it have on our relationships, minds and bodies? What can the simple act of sitting still teach us about ourselves? When Tim Parks fails to find a cause for his crippling chronic pain, he turns to meditation....

Travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character and goals. \"Delves into the very essence of being a fan, while seamlessly exploring Italian history, politics, culture and society,\" Guardian Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states?...

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....

Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. So what is the sparkling, magnetically attractive Beth Marriot doing here? Beth is fighting demons: a catastrophic series of events has undermined all prospect of happiness....

“Parks’ keen attention to detail brings the game to life, alive even to the most casual observer.” —BooklistIs Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football (which we Americans know as “soccer”) a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities?...

In any 24 hours there might be sleeping, eating, kids, parents, friends, lovers, work, school, travel, deadlines, emails, phone calls, Facebook, Twitter, the news, the TV, Playstation, music, movies, sport, responsibilities, passions, desires, dreams--why should anyone stop what they\'re doing and read a book?...

At 15, Richard Bowen is a cool and articulate observer of the havoc wreaked when a wave of religious euphoria sweeps through his father"s well-to-do suburban parish. In the period that follows the young curate Rowlandson"s spectacular conversion, strange and disturbing events begin to happen....

For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams of rivers and seas, dreams of water.\' Just days after Albert James writes these lines to his son John, in London, he is dead. Abandoning a pretty girlfriend and the lab where he is completing his PhD, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in mourning....

The remarkable story of the Renaissance\'s preeminent financiers. Their name is a byword for immense wealth and power, but before their renown as art patrons and noblemen the Medicis built their fortune on banking?specifically, on lending money at interest....