Description

From the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted chronicler of Italy, 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. Preoccupied by this sudden intrusion of his past, he flies, oblivious, into the epicentre of a crisis he has barely registered on the news.

It is spring, his luxury hotel offers every imaginable comfort; perhaps he will be able to weather the situation and return home unscathed? What Frank doesn’t know is that he’s about to make a discovery that will change his heart and his mind.

Hotel Milano is a universal story from a unique moment in recent history: a book about the kindness of strangers, and about a complicated man who, faced with the possibility of saving a life, must also take stock of his own.

Publisher Review

Hotel Milano is one of Tim Parks' most engaging and satisfying books * Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2023* * Tim Parks, a long-time resident in Italy, is an accomplished writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and this deft and affecting short novel combines his skills * New Statesman * A compelling mix of emotional introspection and pressing drama * Mail on Sunday * Excellent and quietly devastating... While recent pandemic novels such as Sarah Hall's Burntcoat and Sarah Moss's The Fell gave us the claustrophobia and forced intimacy of the pandemic, Hotel Milano comes closest to evoking what it was really like to watch the world be redrawn in real time * Guardian * Parks writes with an appealing wry elegance, and his quirky, erudite narrator finally finds solace not so much in the grand themes of European culture as in a shredded balloon stuck in a tree or the yellow beak of a blackbird * Spectator *