Show 17: the author and journalist on his favourite wife...
Tony Parsons is the author of Man and Boy, which won the Book of the Year award in 2001 and has been translated into 38 languages. His subsequent novels, One for My Baby, Man and Wife, The Family Way, and Stories We Could Tell, have all been best-sellers.
Tony Parsons grew up on a council estate in Essex and began his career as a music journalist on the NME, writing about punk music. Later, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror.
Parsons married fellow NME journalist Julie Burchill - they had both answered the same advert in the paper requesting "hip, young gunslingers" to apply as new writers. He and Burchill collaborated on a book in 1979 – The Boy Looked at Johnny. They married, but divorced acrimoniously, and Parsons was given custody of their son.
Before finding widespread success as a mainstream novelist, Parsons was a regular guest on the BBC Two arts review programme The Late Show. He still appears infrequently on the successor to that programme, Newsnight Review. He has written several books of cultural criticism, including Dispatches from the Front Line of Popular Culture and Big Mouth Strikes Again.
Parsons wrote a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983), before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men, in a series of novels which include Man and Boy (winner of the 2001 British Book of the Year award), Man and Wife, The Family Way, and One for My Baby. He is consequently often credited as being a prominent exponent (along with Nick Hornby) of the so-called 'lad-lit' genre. His last novel, Stories We Could Tell, reflects Parsons' Seventies' career as an NME journalist. His latest novel, My Favourite Wife, is published in February 2008.
My Favourite Wife
A sizzling Shanghai tale of sex, romantic struggles and second wives from the bestselling author of Man and Boy Hot shot young lawyer Bill Holden and his wife Becca move with their four-year-old daughter to the booming, gold-rush city of Shanghai. It is a place of opportunity and temptation, where fortunes are made and foreign marriages come apart in spectacular fashion. Bill's law firm houses the Holden family in Paradise Mansions -- a luxury apartment block full of 'second wives': beautiful young women like JinJin Li, ex-school teacher, crossword addict, dedicated roller skater and the Holdens' neighbour. After Becca witnesses a near-tragedy, she returns temporarily to London with Holly -- and Bill and JinJin are thrown together. Bill wants to be a better man than the millionaire who keeps JinJin Li as a second wife. Better than any man who cheats. Becca is his best friend. But in the end, can he give JinJin anything different -- can he give her the love she deserves? And can he love his wife too?