Tim Parks' Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Tim Parks recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Tim Parks' favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

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Little Novels of Sicily

Giovanni Verga, D.H. Lawrence

3.8

First Published in a single volume in 1883, the stories collected in Little Novels of Sicily are drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood, reported at the time to be the poorest place in Europe. Verga's style is swift, sure, and implacable; he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath, and tells them with a stark economy of words. There's something dark and tightly coiled at the hear

Recommended by Tim Parks.

Tim Parks

Verga is simply one of the great narrators of all time and his novellas are probably among the best pieces of fiction written in Italy, ever. Given my intense admiration of this guy and my feeling that these stories cannot help but impress, then it seemed such an obvious choice to me. [source]

Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo

4.0

This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure as its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business or make sense of his private life.

A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination ZENO'S CONSCIENCE has provoked enormous affection in its readers

Recommended by Tim Parks.

Tim Parks

Let’s make a quick comment about Svevo. Svevo was not his real name. His real name was Schmitz and he grew up as a German speaker in the area of Trieste where there was a big linguistic mix, so Italian was his second language. He had written a number of books which he self-published, which was quite common at that time, and received no attention at all really, so he was a failure in that regard. He worked as a businessman and he was quite successful in a company producing industrial paints for painting ships and things like that, which was a fairly big business in the Trieste area, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. [source]

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Arturo's Island

Elsa Morante, Isabel Quigley

4.2

On a small Island in the Tyrrhenian Sea there lives a boy as innocent as a seabird. Arturo's mother is dead; his father away. Black-clad women care for him, give him the freedom to come and go as he likes. Then the father returns with a new wife, Nunziata, a girl barely older than Arturo. At first hatred and contempt are all the boy feels for his stepmother. In time, Arturo and Nunziata re-create

Recommended by Tim Parks.

Tim Parks

This is Elsa Morante’s great book. [source]

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The Moon and the Bonfires

Pavese, Cesare.

4.0

The nameless narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years

Recommended by Tim Parks.

Tim Parks

Pavese was a very difficult young man with all kinds of problems – above all, problems with women. He never really had a happy relationship with a woman. His notebooks are full of discussion about premature ejaculation and the difficulty of ever having a mature relationship with anybody. He became quite an important translator very early on in his life. He translated James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and he translated Moby Dick when he was only 21 or 22, and that – for people who understand translation particularly – is an extraordinary thing to have done because you need a huge maturity as a translator to cover all the styles wrapped up in Moby Dick. Translation had become a way of hiding for him. I think a lot of translators find that. You can really just bury your own problems in somebody else’s book. [source]

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The Garden of the Finzi Continis

Giorgio Bassani, Jamie Mckendrick

4.0

This is a haunting, elegiac novel which captures the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving imperceptibly towards its doom. Vittorio De Sica turned the book into a film in 1970, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.

Recommended by Simon Mawer and Tim Parks.

Tim Parks

Of all the books that I have selected…this is the easiest to read as a novel and it’s the one that has the classic novel plot that will engage even the most ardent lovers of popular fiction. [source]

Simon Mawer

This is one of the greatest books that I know. It is beautifully done. There is an anonymous narrator who is clearly based on Giorgio Bassani’s own experiences. Again, it is an oblique look at the fate of European Jews. [source]