Books by Frederic Raphael

Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner? What is the relationship between Victor, who can write equally well with left hand or right, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about whom he once made a film, a film which is showing on TV as he enters his suite? Who is the beautiful girl whom he sees in the lobby, and is she the same girl who is later found dead under sinister circumstances? Is Victor England a victim or a killer?There have been many novels about Hollywood. There has never been one like this. Frederic Raphael's vision of California Time is of a 'sequence of presents', and his innovations in the form of the novel serve only to add to the multi-faceted strangeness of the 'celluloid capital'. Victor England, young and old at the same time, is a man of many wives and many films, rich and yet dependent on the bounty of a failing industry, whose golden slave he is.

Marion and Barnaby Pierce are an American couple who are about to sell the New England house in which they have raised what seems to be a happy family. They are leaving on a trip across America in a vintage jaguar which Barnaby intends to give his son who is getting married in Los Angeles. Their long drive from coast to coast is planned to include a number of stops: the first to deposit their dog with Marion's pious, bitter sister in upstate New York.At every stop there are memories and surprises as Barnaby and Marion live and re-live their secret dramas and, in the allusive, edgy dialogues of a long-married couple, reveal more about themselves than they care to confess. In Minneapolis, they find that their daughter, Stacey, is pregnant by one man and living with another; in Chicago, Barnaby's old writing partner, now a millionaire businessman, is unwisely lured into an old vaudeville routine; in Seattle, a meeting with a newspaper editor who once loved Marion re-opens old wounds; and in Los Angeles, their other daughter, Zara, who now calls herself Zenobia, turns out to be a shockingly unsociable member of her brother's wedding.

First published in 1965, this is a tale of the face that has launched a thousand billboards. Diana Scott is "The Happiness Girl" in ads plastered all over the country, and she's hunting happiness in more ways than she's care to confess. She's the darling of the rich and powerful: of Prince Cesare della Romita...of TV writer and interviewer Robert Gold...of suave business success Miles Brand.She's the life of the Dolce Vita, Paris version - a reckless seeker of self, caught up in a frenzied sexcursion of jet-set Europe. This is her story - a novel based on the bold and powerful Joseph E. Levine motion picture.

A sharp, often surprising, view of the classical world by a major classics scholar at Cambridge and author of The Glittering Prizes