Tim Parks

Life,​ for the narrators of Joseph O’Neill’s five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan...

Hisham Matar​ doesn’t need to look far for his subject matter. In his remarkable memoir The Return (2016) he explained that a privileged childhood in a wealthy Libyan family turned to nightmare when his father, leader of an anti-Gaddafi insurrection, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli. He eventually disappeared, never to re-emerge. As a result Matar’s...

Three hundred​ characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep...

Alessandro Manzoni​ was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman. Pietro was 26 years older than his wife. She was bored by his company and it’s widely believed that Alessandro wasn’t his child. Sent to a wet nurse in the country, the boy spent most of...

Miroslav​ Blam appreciates his apartment because it’s ‘in the centre of things, yet remains a hideaway’. A mansard at the top of his town’s most prominent building, on the edge of Main Square, it presents several lines of defence. There is a watchful janitor, no lift, many stairs to climb, ‘meddlesome people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you...