Hotel Milano

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the bestselling writer of Italian Ways, Europa and The Hero's Way, a story set during the first days of lockdown in Europe, about the unexpected kindness of strangers and one man's emotional reckoning.

Milan, 2020. Drawn abruptly from his reclusive life in London for a friend's funeral, Frank finds himself in the eye of a pandemic he had barely registered on the news. From the relative comfort of his balcony at Hotel Milano, he surveys the train station across the piazza, seeing the mad dash for the last trains, hearing the sirens and watching the police stop people in the street. He feels himself remote from it all.

Then, one night, the sound of a child's footsteps leads him to discover a family sheltering secretly above him: a family who need his help. As the days pass, this reserved and difficult man begins to open himself to others. Faced with the task of saving a life, he must also take stock of his own.

©2023 Tim Parks (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics 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

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