A geologist turns sleuth in this "engrossing and beautifully written suspense novel" set in Greece by the author of the Booker Prize shortlisted Europa ( The New York Times).A New York Times Notable BookIn the hallucinatory light and heat of a Mediterranean island, London geologist Peter Nicholson arrives to inspect a granite quarry where a worker has died under suspicious circumstances. Hired to write as damning a report ...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year: A deliciously entertaining account of expatriate life in a small village just outside Verona, Italy.Tim Parks is anything but a gentleman in Verona. So after ten years of living with his Italian wife, Rita, in a typical provincial Italian neighborhood, the novelist found that he had inadvertently collected a gallery full of splendid characters. In this wittily observed account, Parks introduces readers to his home town, wi...

The prize-winning author of Europa and Tongue of Flame "explores the nature of goodness and moral faith in this poignant, witty, and disturbing novel" ( Library Journal).George Crawley knows a thing or two about being good. After watching his missionary father die in Africa and his selfless mother get taken advantage of back in England, he knows that being good is for chumps. Looking out for himself, George has established a great career a...

A "marvelous" Mediterranean memoir of an expatriate father raising his children in Italy—from the author of Italian Neighbors ( The Washington Post).Tim Parks offers another lively firsthand account of Italian society and culture—this time focusing on all the little things that turn an ordinary newborn infant into a true Italian.When British-born Tim Parks heard a mother at the beach in Pescara shout to her son, "Alberto, don't sweat! No y...

The best-selling author of Italian Neighbors returns with a wry and revealing portrait of Italian life—by riding its trains.Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, R...

A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors.Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the...

**'A gripping work, and a gripping translation' Nicholas Lezard, GuardianNiccolò Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics**As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notori...

A book that begins before Adam and ends after us. In this magisterial work by the Italian intellectual superstar Roberto Calasso, figures of the Bible and its whole outline emerge in a new light: one that is often astonishing and disquieting, as indeed—more than any other—is the book from which they originateRoberto Calasso's The Book of All Books is a narration that moves through the Bible as if through a forest, where every branch—every verse—may offer so...

Henry Dodge's trials and tribulations continue in The Best Laid Plans, but this time around the stakes are much higher! He struggles with the aftereffects of the Summer of 1985 and all that happened in Los Angeles with King George and his minions, including his childhood crush Danny, confessing to murder. He attempts to stop the storm of memories with drugs, and soon enough becomes addicted to crystal meth, which is provided by his dealer Jeff, who has a duplicitous side t...

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 you stop what you're doing and read a book?Reading is not an innate human ability. Many people can't read. Many people would rather read a newspaper, a magazine, a blog, a cereal packet, than a novel.But peop...

The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarde...

New Directions is proud to be the publisher of the the distinguished Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi, whose works include The Edge of the Horizon, a story of an “unimportant death,” now available for the first time in a paperback edition.Late on night, the body of a young man is delivered to the morgue of an Italian town. The next day's newspapers report that he was killed in a police raid, and that went by the obviously false name "Carlo Nobodi." Spino, the morg...