Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

<p><b>Shortlisted, Alistair MacLeod Award for Short Fiction, New Brunswick Book Award for Fiction, and Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award</b></p><p>One of Canada's literary treasures, Mark Anthony Jarman returns with a&nbsp;book of moving and often funny tales of a man's quest for himself. A.S. Byatt says that his writing is &#34;extraordinary, his stories gripping,&#34; and in this gorgeous new collection, Jarman delivers something new once again.</p> <p>In <i>Knife Party at the Hotel Europa</i>, Jarman writes about losing and finding love, marriage and melancholy, the dislocation and redemptive power of travel in Italy's sensual summer.</p> <p>A man travels to Italy to escape the memory of love lost, and a marriage ended. He passes through sun-drenched landscapes of cliffs and seaside paradises, while the corpses&nbsp; of refugees wash up on the beach; he parties with the young and beautiful Italians he meets on the train while a man bleeds to death in the hallway. A teenage thief prowls the roof of the tourist hotel at night; an embassy is bombed; holy statues come alive to roam in a gang stealing used restaurant grease.</p> <p>He suffers the acute loneliness of one who has abandoned and been abandoned, and in this exquisite suffering, he finds how beautiful this life can be. In vivid, sensuous prose, Jarman&#39;s stories circle and overlap in surprising, weird, and wonderful ways. Tangents turn out to be crucial, allusions are powerful.</p>