I don’t cry at books. I just don’t. I must have cried at books when I was a boy, before I entered adulthood at the age of 13 with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the work of Ian Fleming and Tom Wolfe, but I don’t remember doing so. Catch me watching a romcom at 30,000 feet after two glasses of champagne and you’ll see a gibbering wreck, but I literally can’t remember the last book that brought a tear to my eye. Until this one.
Tony Parsons wrote Man & Boy in 1999, a brilliantly engaging novel that won book of the year, made its writer rich, and launched a number of equally successful sequels. Recently Parsons has been producing crime novels, but this return to his own very successful genre was caused by a real-life relationship.
