Top 10 troubled males in fiction

Tony Parsons' new novel is Men From The Boys, the final installment of his Harry Silver trilogy, which began with Man and Boy and was then followed by Man and Wife.

For the Guardian he named his top ten troubled males in fiction.

One troubled man on the list:

Magwitch in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

From the moment he grabs Pip by the throat in a graveyard until the time he sneaks back from Botany Bay to reveal himself as the young man's secret benefactor, Magwitch is one of the great tormented souls in literature. Violent, uneducated, blundering, yet full of love and desperate to do one good thing in his life.

Read about the rest of the list.

Great Expectations also made John Mullan's ten best list of fights in fiction, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and numbers among Kurt Anderson's five most essential books. It is #1 on Melissa Katsoulis' list of "twenty-five films that made it from the book shelf to the box office with credibility intact."

--Marshal Zeringue