Milan

This slim, unsettling novel opens with Lucia trying to navigate the ‘mess’ of her daughter Amanda’s return home to their apartment near Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo. Pieces of torn bread, a heaped-up blanket and other strange ‘traces’ are indications of Amanda’s emotional disarray after hastily leaving Milan on the eve of lockdown. But she’d already abandoned her university studies by the time she’d been violently mugged. Lucia attempts to achieve the difficult balance of caring for, but not suffocating, her daughter, resigning herself to Amanda’s ‘unpredictable comings and goings’ while leaving her ‘something nourishing in the fridge in case she skips breakfast’. But she has already spectacularly misjudged this. When

Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country of half a lifetime. What is, what ought to be and the machinations in the delta between provide much of his material. In this tale of two countries in one, bright, hard-working Valeria leaves Basilicata in southern Italy to study communications and marketing at a private university in Milan — shiny subjects in a city of business a long way from home (the same distance could take her to Tunis or Belgrade). She arrives laden with bread, pastries, fruit and wine, given to her by three aunts at railway stations