Dream of a read bares the psychology of fame

Author’s career as a journalist gives inside track to fashion world

SOUTH African Lisa Lassiter is working in London as the deputy editor of FILLE magazine when we meet her. It’s a massively successful fashion magazine, making lots of money for its owners and publisher.

It has also become a depressing presence in Lisa’s life who longs for the days when she and the editor won awards for doing hard news stories in the magazine amid the fashion and beauty. Those days are gone, though, and now Lisa faces a job where she has to bow and scrape to the magazine’s advertisers, where money is the motivator and not journalism. Of course any South African reader will know that Vanessa Raphaely comes from magazine publishing royalty, and she is careful to point out that the horror of FILLE in no way reflects on the magazines she has worked on – and she is right.

Lisa is also friends with Claudia, a rising star in the movie trade, somewhat fragile and a big party girl… she and Lisa are about to be pushed into a position where they will be on a Greek yacht playing with billionaires and one very famous person in the movie industry. Claudia comes joined at the hip to her stepbrother Liam who manages her career. Someone dies on the glamorous weekend away and allows the author to use this strongly plotted novel to examine how people (especially the rich and powerful) manipulate friendships and those who love them.

Raphaely has written a novel that is full of glamour, but with characters who are well portrayed. Lisa keeps her sanity and returns to South Africa, but she finds that the past has a way of reaching into one’s hard-won serenity and playing a few trump cards over happiness and serenity. As with so many journalists there is one story that Lisa has not written: it’s the story about the rape of a young woman, a story that Lisa decides not to write while in London but which will trip her up years later when she is back in South Africa, out of the magazine business and a successful businesswoman.

The past turns up to haunt her and the second part of the novel is a roller-coaster of emotions and, in Lisa’s case, brave decisions. Raphaely takes her story and enriches it with a wicked sense of irony and humour, even in the darkest places. Her asides