Europa

Discover Tim Parks darkly funny and deeply prescient Booker prize-shortlisted novel about the European experience. A brilliantly comic and dyspeptic novel about an obsessive love gone sour. Europa follows Jerry Marlow, a middle-aged Brit teaching at an Italian university, as he and his colleagues embark on a coach trip to Strasbourg in order to petition the European Parliament for improved working conditions. Jealousy and revenge, passion and dread intertwine in one man's soul as he's trapped in the awful claustrophobia of the trip with a group of people he loathes - and the woman who broke his heart. The best thing about Europa is the voice Tim Parks conjures up: Marlow's wry, defeated reason keeps you turning the pages...reminding us that it is far easier to unite a sprawling continent than the few cubic metres that contain a human soul Sunday Times