The second of our extracts from Annalena McAfee’s new novel The Spoiler introduces celebrity gossip journalist Tamara Sim (b. 1970).

When the Editor of The Monitor’s prestigious S*nday magazine had
sent a message asking Tamara if she would interview Honor Tait, she
had replied instantly.

‘Of course! Old-school journalistic heroine!! I’d LOVE to do
her!!! . . .’ Tamara’s response began.

In fact, she had been surprised to learn that the legendary reporter
was still alive. Her knowledge of Tait’s oeuvre was limited – a piece
on the wife of a Chinese dictator from the 1950s had been a set text
on Tamara’s Media Studies course. 

Chinese history, or history of any sort, had never much appealed to Tamara.
Nor, for that matter, had old-school journalistic heroines.

Tamara worked four days a week on The Monitor as a freelance sub
editor and occasional writer for Psst!, the paper’s Saturday celebrity gossip
and TV listings magazine – a brash oik to S*nday’s snooty metaphysician.
The world described in the primary-coloured pages of Psst!, peopled
by sex-addicted soap stars and feuding boy bands, anorexic footballers’
molls and drug-taking TV hosts, was as remote from the intellectual
aristocrats of S*nday as was Pluto, in both its planetary and Disney
incarnations. Lyra Moore’s magazine, irreproachably elegant and cerebral,
was regarded as the British riposte to the New Yorker, with the
added appeal of pictures. Its pages, soft and slippery as silk, had most
recently hosted a meditation on medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco,
a disquisition on Kierkegaard by George Steiner and an essay by Susan
Sontag on the potency of the Polaroid, accompanied by instant photographs
– mysterious, personal and touchingly ill-composed – taken on
one day last March by the recently besieged citizens of Sarajevo. All
three writers were strangers to Tamara and, though she did her best
to tackle their contributions to S*nday, she felt no compulsion to pursue
their acquaintance by reading their books.

Click here to read the Independent on Sunday’s review of The Spoiler