Hotel Milano
  • Published: 21 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529919639
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $24.99

Hotel Milano

Booker shortlisted author of Europa

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Set in a grand hotel as Milan shuts down in early 2020, this is a classic story of a man's emotional reckoning and the unexpected kindness of strangers

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.
  • Published: 21 May 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529919639
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Tim Parks

Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. He lives in Milan.

He is the acclaimed author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including Europa, In Extremis, A Season with Verona, Teach Us to Sit Still and Italian Ways. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the John Florio Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize.

portrait photo of Tim Parks

Also by Tim Parks

Mr Geography
The Hero's Way
Italian Life
See all

Praise for Hotel Milano

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

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

A compelling mix of emotional introspection and pressing drama

Mail on Sunday

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

Hotel Milano is one of Tim Parks' most engaging and satisfying books

Scotsman, *Summer Reads of 2023*
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