Nobody could accuse Tony Parsons of failing to spot a trend. In the same week that he is publicising his new novel, which is set in Shanghai, a glossy magazine runs a design feature entitled Shanghai Chic; the fashion house Ferragamo holds birthday celebrations there because it is one of the fastest-growing luxury markets; and a national radio serialisation of J G Ballard's autobiography begins with a description of his 1930s childhood in, you've guessed it, Shanghai.

So, Shanghai is "it". And it is here, in the so-called new world economic hub, that the prescient Parsons chose to set his latest novel, My Favourite Wife. His protagonist, Bill, is a hotshot London lawyer who moves with his wife Becca and four-year-old daughter Holly to the 21st-century boom-town to act on behalf of the investors in an exclusive property development. The couple's luxury mansion block also serves as home to the "second wives" of rich Chinese businessmen. When Becca tires of Shanghai and returns to London, Bill falls in love with one of these "wives". Meanwhile, his own father is gravely ill back home and he sorely misses his real wife and his daughter. The ensuing emotional crisis is classic Parsons, whose novels - regardless of where they are set - deal with the meaning of love and the bonds of family, with infidelity often the trigger.

"My novels are all about relationships between men and women, what it means to have an ageing parent, what it means to be a good husband and father, how we balance all of that," he explains. They are also highly personal: his first, Man and Boy, was spawned by the end of his marriage to the writer Julie Burchill and being left to bring up their son.

Shanghai is as good a place as any to revisit these perennial themes, with some contemporary politics thrown in for good measure. Parsons insists that My Favourite Wife offers something new. "It's a very convincing portrait of the most exciting city on the planet in 2008," he says. It moves with the times, he adds, in that it embraces the emotional challenges faced by the new international, globetrotting male.

It was Parsons's lifelong Scottish friend David Morrison, a lawyer from Macduff who has lived in Hong Kong for 25 years, who suggested using Shanghai as a location before the glitter wore off. "It's an exciting place," enthuses the author over a glass of sparkling water in a Glasgow hotel. "It's the New York of the 21st century. It's tough, it's brutal and there's an energy that you can't help but react to. It's a gold-rush town. People go there to seek their fortune."

The character of Bill, lured there by the promise of a partnership, soon encounters the corruption of the German capitalists for whom his firm is acting. The land they are developing has been cared for by generations of pig farmers, but the Chinese government is selling it without making adequate provision for them. The brutal treatment of the farmers and appalling health and safety practices in the sweatshops that make cheap clothes for the west - a boy has his arm wrenched off by a piece of machinery in one factory - bring salt-of-the-earth Bill back to reality, and ensure his socialist principles remain intact. Cue soul-searching, the death of his old man back in London, and reconciliation.

Now 54, Parsons has been married to his second wife, Yuriko, the daughter of a Japanese oil executive, for 15 years. They live in Hampstead and have a five-year-old daughter, Jasmine, who is already passionate about recycling ("a middle-class obsession") and speaks perfect Japanese, while he - the working-class Londoner who left school at 16 and made his name as a music writer at the NME during punk rock - struggles to grasp it. He insists he doesn't have a middle-class bone in his body. An only child, he grew up in the rented flat above his father's greengrocer's shop. Any parallels with a certain former Conservative Prime Minister are waved away impatiently: "My dad was much poorer than Margaret Thatcher's."


A MEASURE of how far Parsons has apparently moved from his roots is that he reckons his son Bobby, from his marriage to Burchill, would "probably" call himself working-class, while Jasmine will not. "She's certainly not growing up in a working- class environment, though I doubt she would even think about it," he says.

Lest we start to think Parsons has sold out, however, he is quick to point out that his instinctive sympathy remains with the underdog. "I'm a working-class boy at heart, just like my dad." He boxes to keep fit, and says he's fitter and healthier than he was 10 years ago. "I've only really got one ambition: to watch my daughter growing up. That's the one thing I really care about," he says.

In modern Britain, he says, there is much less social mobility for working-class kids than there was 30 years ago. Punk represented an uprising against the musical and political establishment, and empowered a lot of young people. "I've had a decent career, but I don't think I could get a job if I were starting out now, because everybody's a lot posher," Parsons says. "These days, you have to have been at Oxford to order a minicab at the BBC."

Even so, unlike some of the characters in his new book, he does not believe Britain and the developed world are about to be subsumed by China. "China has never been more free or more affluent than it is now. There have never been more people rising out of poverty. But the problems with corruption, pollution and social inequality are so great that I don't buy the notion they'll be the world's new superpower.

"The whole economic miracle of China is predicated on the fact they've got a lot of poor people who make stuff for rich people very cheaply. Plus they're a one-party state, and one-party states are essentially stupid. Around 80% of their rivers are polluted. I'd be more impressed if they had clean water, a free press and unions in their factories. They have none of the things we in the west take for granted."

He finds it significant that the man who sent tanks into Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping, is the man who organised the "economic miracle". "The new China is not a capitalist society in the way we know it. It's like an authoritarian capitalism."

That said, he is immensely fond of the Chinese people. "I admire their resilience and their work ethic," he says. "I've always thought there has never been a people less suited to communism than the Chinese."

Whether the west will infiltrate south-east Asia is another matter. Cancer is one of the themes of My Favourite Wife, and I ask if that is a metaphor for the fact that the Chinese are beginning to adopt the largely unhealthy western diet and lifestyle. Parsons's own father's death from lung cancer, emotionally recounted in Man and Boy, is repeated almost verbatim in My Favourite Wife.

"There has been a lot of cancer in my life," he responds. "Between my wife and I, three of our parents have gone to cancer. It's a brutal, hard fact for us, as it is for a lot of people.

"That's why people respond to my books. They're very personal, as personal as it gets. They talk about what a lot of people are going through. Readers don't see my life in the books. They see their own."

  • My Favourite Wife, by Tony Parsons, is published by HarperCollins, £17.99. He will be appearing at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on Monday, March 10, at 6pm as part of Aye Write!