SOURCE: “So He Kissed Her Older Sister,” in Spectator, January 28, 1995, p. 33.

In the following review, Read offers a mixed assessment of Cara Massimina, stating that it “teeters between artful construction and lively implausibility.” However, Read finds the novel’s sequel, Mimi's Ghost, “muddled and uninvolving.”

Tim Parks, besides being a writer, is a part-time English teacher in Verona. He has now written two novels about an English teacher in Verona who elopes with an Italian 17-year-old heiress. He pretends to kidnap her; he claims the ransom, murders her and marries her sister. You can almost see Parks slumped in a sweaty classroom, daydreaming it all up, as some wretched Italian schoolboy opposite him tries to decline ‘to be’.

In Cara Massimina, Parks's alter-ego, Morris Duckworth, is dogged by feelings of failure. He puts it down to his working-class roots, his North Acton origins, his mother's early death and...