Fame and Fortune Author:Frederic Raphael 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 charac... more »ter, 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.« less