Raphael, Frederic: Glittering Prizes, The

Frederic Raphael's brilliant and absorbing portrait of a group of young men and women pursuing the 'Glittering Prizes' of life--whatever they imagine them to be - has long been considered a classic. Spanning the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a time when English society was changing with disconcerting speed, the characters are first seen as students at Cambridge, before the story moves on to follow their progress and varying fortunes in the larger world of the media and academe.

For Adam Morris, of the quicksilver tongue, the concentration camps of which he has only heard of and the social life of England, which he has experienced, combine to give him a scorching skepticism. Unable to accept without suspicion what life offers, he develops a sharp ambivalence that allows him both to enjoy the fruits of a successful screenwriting career and also to retain the self-critical detachment of a novelist.

For the other colourful and powerfully realised characters, success, money and satisfaction come in varying degrees. Over all of them the golden Cambridge era, with its smart badinage, its exploratory sex and its uncertain friendships, throws a light - or a shadow - from which none, perhaps, can ever quite escape.

The subject of a highly-acclaimed 1976 television series starring Tom
Conti, The Glittering Prizes is a witty, incisive and moving saga of an era and a generation. This new edition will be widely welcomed.