The Wife's Tale? It sounds promisingly Chaucerian, and among a recent clutch of wife-on-husband books, perhaps the liveliest is Pamela Stephenson's volume on tubby hubby Billy Connolly.

One feels a little sorry for Billy. He married this off-the-wall Aussie blonde, only to have her turn into an LA-dwelling clinical psychologist. What with that, and Connolly's much publicised childhood traumas, one might fear the worst. In fact, Billy (HarperCollins Pounds 17.99) is light in touch, if heavy on the exclamation marks. There are chapters called things like "See you, Judas, you're getting on my tits!"; a picture of Connolly's father is captioned "So that's where Billy got the dimple in his chin!"; and Stevenson peppers her man's story with anecdotes that sound suspiciously like the start of one of Connolly's gags:

"When Billy first met Iris Pressagh in 1965, he thought she was delightful, very beautiful and, moreover, she never once vomited on him. He was still recovering from an incident in Edinburgh involving a sleeping bag he'd got inside one evening with a young woman who was feeling a little off-colour ..."

That said, this rags-to-riches story can hardly fail to be moving and intriguing. It explains the angry undercurrents in Connolly's ferocious, bad-boy comedy, and fans of this - and of his straight acting talent, in Mrs Brown and elsewhere - will relish the book.