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HLIAI ioNsi iii> DRAMA TONY PARSONS
My Favourite Wife (HarrierColliiisi .0
The question of whether it's possible to truly love more than one person is perhaps the most enduring theme in world literature. Writers as diverse as Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, DH Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov have created particularly powerful tales of thwarted love and sexuality. In recent years, the journalist and author Tony Parsons has been trumpeted as a modern-day chronicler of relationships and family life from the perspective of white, middle-class males.
His latest novel, My Favourite Wife, follows ambitious lawyer Bill as he and his spouse Becca and their four-year-old emigrate from London to Shanghai. Becca's enthusiasm for the teeming boomtown quickly wanes and, when she is forced to return home, Bill is drawn to Jin Jin Ii, resident of Paradise Mansions, where rich Chinese businessmen host their ‘second wives’. They fall in love, pitching Bill into a whirl of guilt and soul-searching about his responsibility to both lovers.
The ‘second wife’ phenomenon is an interesting springboard from which to consider the thorny business of monogamy in the modern age. Yet, Parsons wastes his premise with extended passages of banal, humourless exposition as Bill struggles with his narrow personal predicament. For all its avowed attempts to explore the boundaries between sex, relationships, obsession and love, the conclusions are rarely anything but conventional, with the female characters particularly sketchily drawn, and there are few surprises as the plot unfolds. (Allan Radcliffe)
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oaiME THRILLER ALLAN GUTHRIE
Savage Night Polygon) 0...
As the Winner of last year's Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year, Edinburgh's Allan Guthrie is right at the ‘OretrOnt oi‘ the expanding Sutygerire known as Tartan Now. That Ian Rankin the godfather of the strie. has also offered a personal recomrnenriattrm .5 further cause to specalate that Guthrie's .vork might fill a sizeable Chunk of the oost-Rebus void.
H:s prose as Clint/EC and TO the DOiht as gooo nOrr thriller demands. brusdue‘y :n the moment and alert to the Characters reaches to It seems a simple nmethod to rnaster. bat tne authors way With his idiom is honed and preCise: there's a certain glib brutality t0 noir writing and. from
ALSO PUBLISHED 5 PAPERBACK DEBUT NOVELS Pfiya Baall lsho and Mushq A generational novel ab0ut a Sikh mother whose secret past corrodes her life with tragic consequences f0r all. Black Swan. Catharina Hanrahan Lost Girls and Love Hotels By day Margaret is training to be an air stewardess in Tokyo and by night she is dousing her personal demons in a sex and drugs frenzy. This can't end well. Pocket.
Ottavlo Cappollanl Who is Lou Sciortino? An Elmore Leonardesque tale of the young member of a New York crime family, who flees to Sicily after the movie studio he manages is blown up. Picador.
Clifford Ohaao Wink/e A teddy bear is accused of masterminding terrorist atrocities in the US heartland. Unusual, to say the least. Hodder. Tatiana do Roanay Sarah ’3 Key It's Paris 1942 and a young girl has locked her kid brother in a cupboard to save him from persecution while the rest of the family are dragged off to the concentration camps. Faber.
the “harem young Fraser returns ricrr‘e "nth his date to find a ‘eheaded man in he catntao, the raw revenge drama keeps ‘CU turning the pages. layering one Intrigue over the next. A masterful exercise in pulp stOrytelling. lDavid Pollock)
14—28 Feb 2008 THE LIST 33