Fame and Fortune — Frederic Raphael

With a rich cast, a fast-moving story line, and dialogue that displays all the wit and panache for which Frederic Raphael is famous, Fame and Fortune - recently dramatised on BBC Radio 4 - is a powerful sequel to his bestselling classic, The Glittering Prizes. Success as a novelist and Hollywood screenwriter has brought fame and its pleasures to Adam Morris, whose public cynicism continues to mask his private anguish. He still moves warily amongst his ambitious Cambridge contemporaries, but for them, as for him, success has proved a double-edged sword. For Adam, a startling sexual encounter, as well as the defection of his son, Tom, and his brilliant daughter, Rachel, threaten to capsize his complacency and his marriage. In Mrs Thatcher's golden years, money and power can do little to ensure the glittering prizewinners from the trip-wires that lace their upward path - or from the violence and death that stalks and strikes. Frederic Raphael has written more twenty novels, with a variety of settings, from post-war England, Greece during the Civil War, South America in the time of Caudillos, France in the Occupation and today's United States. He has also written five volumes of short stories, as well as many film and television scripts. He has written biographies of Byron and of W.Somerset Maugham.