In the late-80s, Tess and Becky are negotiating the world of high finance and the City. When disaster hits amid rumours of incompetence, Tess's father, a Lloyd's Name, suffers terrible losses. Meanwhile, Tess and Becky are faced with hard choices, not least the one presented by biology: children. This is a deliberate reworking of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In this version Becky Sharp (still called Becky) is a city whizz-kid of the eighties- clever, beautiful and amoral- while Amelia (now called Tess) falls in love with a man who marries her but doesn't love her. Elizabeth Buchan draws some clever parallels between the eighties and the Regency (when Vanity Fair was originally set)and this novel has the same sharpness and unsentimentality as Thackeray's masterpiece.
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