Home Thoughts

by Tim Parks

Julia has left home. She has gone to Italy. She has left her lover, her job, her flat, the closely-knit group of friends who meant so much to her. Why? And the motley group of ex-pats she finds in Verona, the Oxbridge brigade, the revolutionary Scot, the cool Canadian, the feminist Flossy - why do they find it so impossible to return home, as if their very identities depend somehow on this thousand-mile displacement? Centred around a love story full of twists, turns and revelations, Home Thoughts explores a world of lost directions, wavering commitments and misplaced ambitions as Julia's adventurous departure confronts her more mercilessly than ever with the problem of what on earth she is to do with her life.

208 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 1988

About the author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since, raising a family of three children. He has written fourteen novels including Europa (shortlisted for the Booker prize), Destiny, Cleaver, and most recently In Extremis.
During the nineties he wrote two, personal and highly popular accounts of his life in northern Italy, Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education. These were complemented in 2002 by A Season with Verona, a grand overview of Italian life as seen through the passion of football. Other non-fiction works include a history of the Medici bank in 15th century Florence, Medici Money and a memoir on health, illness and meditation, Teach Us to Sit Still. In 2013 Tim published his most recent non-fiction work on Italy, Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.
Aside from his own writing, Tim has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and Leopardi; his critical book, Translating Style is considered a classic in its field. He is presently working on a translation of Cesare Pavese's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires.
A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, his many essays are collected in Hell and Back, The Fighter, A Literary Tour of Italy, and Life and Work.
Over the last five years he has been publishing a series of blogs on writing, reading, translation and the like in the New York Review online. These have recently been collected in Where I am Reading From and Pen in Hand.

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anybody who has been an expat will share the lost sadness of this one. It amazes me how often people leave, and then come back to their place of origin and are surprised to discover that it is no longer home. As one who has lived for more than a decade in each of three cities, as well as my original home town, to which I have returned, it seems to me that the sense of any of them being home is lost in the snap of your fingers. Two of them never felt like home. One did, but although for the first years or so that I found myself going back for visits, it felt like I was coming home, that it was where I really belonged, suddenly that changed. There were various reasons why, but that somewhere else was home was not one. How sad is that? Just like the book.

[Mary Curran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written account of relationships, but very 80s! Did not réalise it was written in 87 until i had I completed it. Thé 80s- navel-gazant and pop psychology.