STARTING OVER - Softcover

Parsons, Tony

3.29

1,569 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007226519 ISBN 13: 9780007226511

Publisher: HarperFiction, 2009

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This is the story of how we grow old – how we give up the dreams of youth for something better – and how many chances we have to get it right.

George Bailey has been given the gift we all dream of – the chance to live his life again.
After suffering a heart attack at the age of 42, George is given the heart of a 19-year-old – and suddenly everything changes...

He is a friend to his teenage son and daughter – and not a stern Home Secretary, monitoring their every move.

He makes love to his wife all night long - instead of from midnight until about five past. And suddenly he wants to change the world, just as soon as he shakes off his hangover.

But George Bailey discovers that being young again is not all it is cracked up to be – and what he actually wants more than anything in the universe is to have his old life back.

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Review:

Praise for Tony Parsons:

'A funny, sad love story' Spectator

'Tony Parsons is the master of the bittersweet love story' Red

'Parsons has created a much bigger and more compelling book. It's a major achievement' Mirror

‘Funny, serious, tender and honest...Tony Parsons is writing about the genuine dilemmas of modern life’
Sunday Express

‘He takes as his specialist subject contemporary emotional issues which almost every other male writer has ignored’ Guardian

‘Memorable and poignant – nobody squeezes more genuine emotion from a scene than Tony Parsons’ Spectator

From the Author:

Tony Parsons on Starting Over

Starting Over is the story a man who gets the chance to do what many of us dream of – to be young again, to go right back to the start and to have a second chance at getting his life right.

George Bailey is 47 years old – a husband, a father, and a policeman. He is an old-fashioned guy who is about become young again.

A hereditary heart condition means that George is what the police call a canteen cowboy; a desk-bound copper who rarely leaves the station. But when his old partner gives him a chance for a morning of mild adventure, running red lights and chasing petty criminals, George can’t resist, and tragedy strikes. Confronted by an armed man, George has the heart attack that he has been dreading for years. And when he is given the heart of a 19-year-old wild boy, nothing is ever the same again.

It is like Peter Parker being bit by that spider. Overnight George is transformed from being a stern patrician father who breathalyses his son when he comes home to an idealistic, rebellious free spirit who wants to change the world and get off his face. And overnight George goes from being a settled, staid once-a-week married man to being a three-times-a-session, is-it-good-for-you-baby? love machine, forcing his wife Lara to leave the bedroom light on, “Just so I know it’s really you.”

But George discovers that what we wish for is not necessarily what makes us happy. Soon George’s teenage son and daughter grow weary of a father who wants to be their friend. And soon enough Lara tires of a husband who only has one thing on his mind – getting his hand inside her bra – and yearns for the man she knew to come back. Lara doesn’t want an overgrown teenager. The children do not want another friend to give them Facebook hugs. They want their dad. Lara wants her husband.

When that happens, George learns what it is really like to go back to the start and begin again. And he must learn how to be a husband and a father and a man before he loses all the people he loves. George Bailey suddenly has to grow up fast, while at the same time uncovering the mystery of where his new heart really comes from.

Starting Over is a book about how we live our lives. How do we balance the longing for family with the need to be free? How do we weigh our concern for the planet with our concern for the few people we actually live with? And is there an age when a man in Diesel jeans just looks stupid? Starting Over asks - what do we lose when we finally let go of being young? And what do we gain?

I hope that Starting Over is a light book about a heavy subject. Really, it is the story of one man’s search for enlightenment. I think that many of us have an endless appetite for stories about the getting of wisdom, and in that category I would include everything from the movie Groundhog Day to the Buddhist classic Siddhartha. There is something about watching dumb men become smarter that pulls at our soul.

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