RESULTS

'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. A brilliant and controversial anthropologist, the nature of Albert James' research, and the circumstances of his death, are far from clear. On top of this, John must confront his mother's coolness, and the strangeness of the cremation ceremony that she has organized for his father. No sooner is the body consigned to the flames than a journalist arrives, determined to write a biography of the dead man. The widow will have nothing to do with the project, yet seems incapable of keeping away from the journalist.

The title piece of this collection addresses D.H. Lawrence's fundamental belligerence and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterized by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett and Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongst others. Parks is also known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Macchiavelli and the Medici. Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on the serious issue of World Cup football. Above all, these are essays whose ideas and themes call to each other in the most unexpected and ironic ways. From the wide variety of subjects emerges a consistent and convincing picture of a world that forever resists the writer's embattled attempts to wrap it up in language.

Crown Court Judg, Daniel Savage is expert at untangling the lives of those who appear in front of him in court. However, at home things are less straightforward as his daughter becomes increasingly mysterious and he keeps receiving puzzling phone calls demanding help. As his life descends into a mess of violence and confusion, Savage is forced to reevaluate his entire existence.

A sequel to Cara Massimina. Morris can't get over the Italian girl who eloped with him two years ago, but perhaps the dear, dead Mimi can't get over him either. Living in Verona and married to her sister, he hears Mimi's voice and sees her endlessly reincarnated face in Renaissance madonnas.

Collected here for the first time the best from Tim Parks's short fiction, spanning across his entire literary career and enriched by new stories written specifically for this publication. The title story of the collection, Talking about It, presents two friends, George and Michael, meeting ritually in a pub every night after a game of squash. While George recounts his increasingly extravagant sexual experiences, Michael listens on, meditating on how to redeem his boring and somewhat uneventful life. But then one day the tables turn, and Michael finds a way to outfox his friend and transfix his attention with a very interesting story...Whether describing the simmering warfare in an Italian condominium, the problems and pleasures of adultery, or the trappings of the generation game, these stories reveal Tim Parks's deeply-felt preoccupations with the inner workings of the human psyche and the dynamics of human relations.