Tim Parks

In Tim Park’s The Server, sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. So what is the sparkling, magnetically attractive Beth Marriot doing here? Why is a young woman whose irrepressible vitality and confident ego were once set on conquest and stardom, now spending month after month serving in the vegetarian kitchen of a bizarrely severe Buddhist retreat?

In Beth, we see western individualism set against the Buddhist belief that ”the self” is insubstantial fantasy. Brilliantly written, darkly funny, and highly riveting, The Server is literary entertainment at its best.