Final Demands

Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes and its sequel, Fame and Fortune, were widely acclaimed for their dazzling and moving portrait of an era and a generation. Now, in Final Demands, the culminating volume in the trilogy, writer Adam Morris and his high-flying Cambridge contemporaries find themselves at the peak of influence and success as New Labour and the Blair boom years take them high on the slippery pole of success. At the same time, they begin to fear the moment when seniority will render them superfluous. Adam, as astringent as ever, continues to stand centre stage, but his other contemporaries too play their vivid and energetic parts. Alan Parks still commands the nation's screens and microphones; movie director Mike Clode continues to pursue the bitch goddess Success; Joyce Hadleigh realises an unlikely ambition when she becomes 'joined at the hype' with Samuel Marcus Cohen, English literature's Nobel laureate-in-waiting. The younger generation too is growing into unpredictable potency. When he accepts a teaching gig In Los Angeles, Adam finds himself confronting his beautiful daughter Rachel's complex emotional life. And then, back in London, on Boxing Day, he learns that his son Tom's wife, Juliana - granddaughter of a Nazi business man - has come to a startling decision. When he and Juliana call to deliver a belated Christmas present to the film producer Bruno Laszlo, comedy and tragedy collide in a cruelly comic climax.