Destiny Paperback - 2001

Christopher Burton, the protagonist of Tim Parks’s masterful new novel, is one of Britain’s foremost foreign correspondents, the acknowledged world expert on Italian affairs. Three months after returning to London with his Italian wife for an extended stay, Burton, while standing at the reception desk of the Rembrandt Hotel in London’s Knightsbridge, receives a phone call informing him that his teenage son has committed suicide. Why, upon receiving this terrible news, does he immediately conclude that his marriage of almost thirty years is over? And why is grief so slow in coming? Burton feels his pious, mercurial wife may have given him his life in Italy--even his prestigious career--but she has also made it impossible. Was their troubled son somehow the victim of their long, explosive love-hate relationship? Looking back, Burton sees in his life a web of contradictions, unanswered questions, and confusions. And yet, it has been destiny.Intensely dramatic, dark, and yet often hilariously funny, Destinyis a seamless, beautifully plotted story and a profound meditation on marriage and identity, at once romantic and callous, brilliant and blind. In Destiny, Parks offers us a searing account of what it means to tread the narrow line between sanity and psychosis.

Details

• Title Destiny
• Author Tim Parks
• Binding Paperback
• Edition Reprint
• Pages 248
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Arcade Pub, New York
• Date April 17, 2001
• ISBN 9781559705752 / 1559705752
• Weight 0.7 lbs (0.32 kg)
• Dimensions 7.92 x 5.09 x 0.75 in (20.12 x 12.93 x 1.91 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects Domestic fiction, Italy
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 00130423
• Dewey Decimal Code FIC