Tim Parks has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Teach Us to Sit Still.
Teach Us to Sit Still
Summary
Teach Us to Sit Still is the visceral, thought-provoking, and inexplicably entertaining story of how Tim Parks found himself in serious pain, how doctors failed to help, and the quest he took to find his own way out. Overwhelmed by a crippling condition which nobody could explain or relieve, Parks follows a fruitless journey through the conventional medical system only to find relief in the most unexpected place: a breathing exercise that eventually leads him to take up meditation. This was the very last place Parks anticipated finding answers; he was about as far from New Age as you can get. As everything that he once held true is called into question, Parks confronts the relationship between his mind and body, the hectic modern world that seems to demand all our focus, and his chosen life as an intellectual and writer. He is drawn to consider the effects of illness on the work of other writers, the role of religion in shaping our sense of self, and the influence of sports and art on our attitudes toward health and well-being. Most of us will fall ill at some point; few will describe that journey with the same verve, insight, and radiant intelligence as Tim Parks. Captivating and inspiring, Teach Us to Sit Still is an intensely personal - and brutally honest - story for our times.
©2010 Tim Parks (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Cara Massimina
Summary
Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona, and Morris is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress named Massimina, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility. However, after the girl's mother - much to his chagrin - unequivocally forbids her from seeing him, he hits upon a perfect scheme: He convinces the besotted girl to run off with him, then sends ransom notes to her family. Following a frightening logic, Morris' subversions become deeper and darker. Soon events are spiraling with eerie momentum into a nightmare of deception and violence. The first novel in what has become the Duckworth in Verona trilogy, Cara Massimina is a comic thriller that will leave listeners laughing out loud in mortified delight.
©2015 Tim Parks (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Mimi's Ghost
Summary
The second Duckworth novel is "a wild and wacky thriller that's like sharing a roller-coaster ride with a suave maniac." (Publishers Weekly review). Morris Duckworth can't get over Massimina, or Mimi, as he likes to refer to her. But then, he should have thought of that before he kidnapped and killed her. Only now, living in Verona and married to Mimi's sister, does he appreciate how much he misses her and how blindly he has stumbled into a trap of fate. Struggling to adjust to his good fortune, with a lavish house and cushy job, our unsavory hero finds that his new success is rife with tribulation: not least his pushy bride's staggering sexual appetite and his nosy brother-in-law's meddling questions. So when he visits Mimi's grave and her charming photograph winks at him, he's ready for her advice. Mimi seems to be suggesting a path to Christian redemption: he will help the poor African immigrants of Verona. But is his sudden altruism genuine or a cover for further malfeasance? And why, despite his apparent sincerity, are those who get in his charitable way so prone to "accidents?" The dark and funny sequel to Cara Massimina, Mimi's Ghost is the ultimate comedy of self-justification. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for listeners interested in fiction - novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times best-seller or a national best-seller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
©2015 Tim Parks (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Sex is Forbidden
Summary
Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute, the Buddhist retreat where Beth Marriot has taken refuge, and that's a big advantage. Beth has been working as a server, assisting in the kitchen and helping out - discreetly, so the meditators aren't disturbed. The meditators are making big sacrifices to come here and change their lives. So the servers must observe the rules, and silence and separation of the sexes are chief among them. But Beth is fighting demons. She came here at a crossroads in her life, caught between an older lover who wouldn't choose her and a young one who wants to marry her, and she may have caused another man's death when she risked her own life swimming out to sea in a gale. A singer in a band, vital and impulsive, fleshy and sexy, she has been a rebel and a provocateur. And now, conflicted and wandering, she stumbles on a diary in the men's dorm and cannot keep away from it, or the man who wrote it. At the same time, desiring - all too hard - to achieve the inner peace that Buddhist practice promises, she yearns for the example set by the slim, silent, white-clad teacher Mi Nu, and maybe yearns for something more. Comic and poignant at the same time, swiftly paced and completely engaging, Sex Is Forbidden is an entertaining novel about two profoundly different attitudes to life, and Beth - our narrator - is a character to be savored.
©2013 Tim Parks (P)2013 Audible, Inc.