Rapids
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409059059
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Rapids

  • Tim Parks
Formats & editions
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Paperback
5 Jun 2017
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A thrilling adventure story set in the Italian Alps involving group politics, a love affair and white water rapids in another critically acclaimed novel by the masterful Tim Parks.

In the dramatic landscape of the Italian Alps a group of English canoeists arrive for an 'introduction to white water.' Camping, eating and paddling together, six adults and nine adolescents seem set to enjoy what their leader insists on calling a 'community experience.' Their hosts are Clive, a taciturn figure, and Michela, his fragile girlfriend. Joining the group late are Vince, a banker trying to make sense of the flotsam of his existence, and his teenage daughter whom he feels moving inexorably away from him.

The dangerous river manages to bring out the group's qualities and failings in the most urgent fashion, provoking sudden conflicts and unexpected shifts of alliance. An ideal love affair breaks down and an apparently impossible one timidly buds. A banal disagreement turns violent. Meanwhile, the hottest summer on record is filling the glacier-fed rivers with a melt water so wild that it is surely unwise of the distracted instructors to launch their party into the last day's descent of the upper Aurina...
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781409059059
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
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Praise for Rapids

A near-perfect marriage of style and content...A terrific, bravura tale...has a magnificent, thrilling urgency

Sunday Telegraph

A deftly plotted tale...With Rapids, Tim Parks demonstrate, once again, that he is a supremely confident storyteller...As refreshing as it is memorable

Evening Standard

Triumphant...In Rapids he has excelled himself

Daily Telegraph

A writer of considerable intelligence and great technical skill...His work is always tremendously readable

Guardian

A truly outstanding writer... immensely readable and deeply intelligent

Tim Lott, Independent

A thoughtful and moving novel

Mail on Sunday

Parks is a writer of technical brilliance and ambition, whose fiction has been getting better and better...Written with a compelling urgency and energy...It is thrillingly paced

London Review of Books