CAUSE CELEB

Published in 1994, three years before the hugely successful Bridget Jones's Diary (and now available for the first time in the U.S.), Fielding's debut novel Cause Celeb chronicles Rosie Richardson, a twentysomething publicist who escapes to the fictional Nambula to become a relief worker after her affair with one of the glitterati has gone bust. But the romantic quandaries and bitchy social observations that made Bridget so appealing don't seem quite as funny when juxtaposed with horrific scenes of sunken-faced corpses and starving amputees -- an awkward, tragicomic concoction that's v.v. hard to swallow, indeed. D+