Book description
For some time now, I have been plagued, perhaps blessed, by dreams
of rivers and seas, dreams of water.
Just days after controversial anthropologist Albert James writes
these elusive lines to his son John, he is dead. Abandoning his
girlfriend in London, John flies to Delhi to join his mother in
mourning. But the nature of his father's research and the
circumstances of his death are far from clear and, on top of this,
John must confront his mother's coolness, and the strangeness of the
cremation ceremony that she has organised 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, and though
his mother will have nothing to do with the project, she cannot keep
away from the journalist.
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at
Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever
since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including
Europa,
Cleaver
,
A Season with Verona
and
Teach Us to Sit Still
. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys
awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on
literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia,
Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.
