Book review: A vision of a predatory and callow world

Olivia Petter captures the faddish glamour of the London media scene. Picture: Coco Petter
- Gold Rush
- Olivia Petter
- 4th Estate, €16.99
In Olivia Petter’s
, a naive young woman flies too close to the sun.Rose is a PR assistant at Firehouse, one of London’s biggest magazine publishers, her job is to set up lunches and launches, and tempt along the biggest celebrities and influencers she can.
You can imagine the trail of tears this involves, and Rose, who studied art and once dreamt of becoming a painter, is growing weary of all this phoniness when she meets somebody very famous indeed.

He is hardly a character at all in the book, a mildly sleazy jackal who takes full advantage of a messy situation he has engineered before disappearing into the ether to haunt Rose like a shape-shifting ghost.
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