Fame and Fortune is the long-awaited continuation of Frederic
Raphael's best-selling novel The Glittering Prizes, which followed a
generation of Cambridge graduates into the academic and media world
of the 1960s. In this new book, Adam Morris, successful novelist and
screenwriter, now in his late forties, remains the central character,
but many of his contemporaries continue to feature in his life. These
include the ambitious and endlessly scheming movie director Mike
Clode, the Australian-born TV star Alan Parks, who now seems to front
every other serious or semi-serious programme on the box, and Joyce
Hadleigh, whose career on TV Alan has fostered, just as years
earlier, at Cambridge, he fathered her child whom Dan Bradley, now a
primary school headmaster in Wandsworth, raised as his own.The vivid
complexity of Fame and Fortune reflects the nature of London life in
the era of Margaret Thatcher, but also the changing attitudes and
life styles of a younger generation. Adam and his wife Barbara find
themselves faced with the defection of their son, Tom, to a Christian
sect which leads him to drop out of university and desert his family
a situation which is compounded, with disconcerting consequences,
when their beautiful, high-achieving daughter Rachel meets Adam's
college friend Bill Bourne, the son of a scouse docker, now a
professor in California. And in varying ways, the other characters
too discover the fragility of the success and happiness which they
had enjoyed, violence and death playing their cruel sudden parts in
their lives. A critic said of Raphael's early novel, The Limits of
Love, 'With this book Frederic Raphael enters the big league ... the
characters walk off the page and into our lives'. So it is here, but
in a work which is the culmination of a lifetime's experience and by
a major writer now at the peak of his powers.
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