A Vicious Circle [Paperback]

A masterpiece...The greatest novelist under the age of fifty has now stepped onto the stage.

It's like Dickens without the long-winded bits. It makes you laugh, it makes you blub..an excellent and entertaining read.

A plot of marvellous intricacy...it provokes peals of horrid laughter.

Combines wit, panache and extravagance with a poenetrating moral sense...delightfully readable and not a little disturbing

A brilliantly witty satire of modern manners, dissecting and connecting modern London, from its literary circuit to its hospitals and slums, as well as giving a funny and poignant portrait of childbirth and motherhood.

This gripping, moving and hiliarious novel introduces seven characters, each of whom has a profound effect on each other’s lives. Each must choose between probity and self-interest in love and work. Some compromise themselves completely; others oscillate between vice and virtue. Others are redeemed by twists of fate. For in a vicious circle, nothing is certain except change.

For five years timid Mary Quinn has supported her lover, Mark Crawley, in his rise to one of London’s most savage political journalists. Now Mark has started a calculated affair with Amelia, daughter of a newspaper magnate. Mary ‘s translation from jilted lover to a figure of power and vengeance is mirrored by Amelia’s change from vain, snobbish socialite to exhausted mother.

A dazzling plot and lucid, absorbing style characterise this deliciously satirical portrait of the way we live now.

..Although the satirical elements of the novel caused considerable scandal, the purpose of the novel was not to be published as a roman a clef (a genre I have little time for)but to address the way that, under Thatcher, the divisions between the classes in Britian, and London in particular, had deepened disastrously. I wanted to link the world of the rich and powerful like Max de Monde and Ivo Sponge with that of the poor and overlooked, such as Grace, Billy and Tom's patients in the NHS. I did this through a device I found in both Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Balzac's Lost Illusions: telling the story of how Mary, poor and unjustly treated rises in the world to become powerful herself. She then has to choose to what ends she uses her power, and whether she becomes as corrupt as those she has been damaged by. All my novels are about aspects of creativity, and this one is about what can be the artist's deadliest enemy, or best friend: criticism. As both author and critic, I know how wounding stupid and malicious reviews can be. Also, how helpful those that are not necessarily kind but perceptive and intelligent can be. Satire is always dangerous, not least to its author, and I was horrified to discover that two novels satirising the press in the past were successfully suppressed. However, I was deeply annoyed at the way the scandal whipped up by the sillier elements of literary London obscured the more serious purpose of the novel, and I'm pleased to see that many amazon readers at least read it properly, and enjoyed not only its jokes and story but its literary antecedents. I should also add that Ivo Sponge reappears in my latest novel, Love in Idleness, and that there will be a sequel to that and A Vicious Circle published in 2004/5.

A Vicious Circle exposes the corruption of London's journalistic circuit, the horrors of our hospitals and slums, and the transformations caused by motherhood. Gripping, tender and fiercely funny, it has been instantly recognised as a modern classic about the way we live now.

Amanda Craig was born in 1959. She is married, with two children, lives in London and reviews widely.