A tie-in to a terrific new film, but also a bona-fide Bateman novel in its own right, Wild About Harry tells of the trials and tribulations of a sleazy local chat show host.

This is the story of Harry McKee – sleazy local chat show host. A once loving husband, he’s become a drunken unfaithful slob and even his kids won’t speak to him. His wife is divorcing him and taking him to the cleaners. On his last night as a married man he winds up drunk and is beaten up. When he keels over the next day at the divorce hearing his wife and solicitor assume he’s pulling a fast one. He eventually wakes from a week-long coma but he’s lost his memory – everything since 1974. Inside his sagging middle-aged body he feels eighteen. Though he doesn’t know it yet, Harry has been given the chance to get back his life, his wife and his self-respect. If only he could remember how it all went wrong and why his family hate him. As the pieces of his past slowly begin to fall into place we watch Harry attempt to persuade Ruth to fall in love with him all over again, and witness his failure to resurrect his career. Clinging on to the past, he at least still fits into his teenage tank-top and flares – but he’s only got two weeks until the next divorce hearing, when he will be homeless, childless and clueless!

‘Bateman has barged fearlessly into the previously unsuspected middle ground between Carl Hiaasen and Irvine Welsh and claimed it for his own’
GQ

The author was born in Northern Ireland in 1962 and educated at Bangor Grammar School before joining the County Down Spectator, where he was deputy editor for many years. In 1990 he received a Journalist’s Fellowship to Oxford University for his reports from Uganda, and he has received a Northern Ireland Press Award for his weekly satirical column.