Product Description

Natalie is a girl who should be going somewhere. Beautiful, bright and ambitious, she's stuck in a dead end job in the accounts department of Nu Line Telecommunications. Living her life through wild weekend, yearning for something more. When she sees a chance to change her life, she takes it. After all, its' only a minor crime. Nobody will be hurt, will they? But Colin gets hurt. He's the man who Natalie marries. And other people's lives are changed terribly and irrevocably. Because Natalie's actions do have consequences tragic consequences.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173651 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Deborah Moggach's Final Demand is a bleak, uncompromising novel about the greed and selfishness of Natalie, the novel's tough, street-wise heroine. Natalie, who works for "NuLine Communications", a soulless telecommunications company based in Leeds, is frustrated by the realisation that "the next big thing in her life should be happening but thought time was speeding up, the days whisking past, a breathlessness to them now, [her] life remained doggedly the same". She is pretty and intelligent, but when her boyfriend dumps her and she runs into financial problems, she sees the opportunity to turn her boring job processing cheques to her advantage. But first of all, her ingenious plan requires a husband with a very specific name...

Final Demand is very different from Moggach's enormously successful Tulip Fever, but it catches the amoral, cynical world of Natalie and all the characters that she proceeds to dupe in a series of ever bleaker situations. Natalie's crimes seem small, but Moggach attempts to unravel the ways in which even the most trivial crime can have devastating consequences. At times, the story loses focus as Moggach follows those affected by Natalie's misdemeanours, while her heroine is so thoroughly selfish that it become difficult to sympathise with her plight. However, Final Demand neatly captures the soulless sign of the times. --Jerry Brotton

Sunday Telegraph
‘Moggach combines the vigorous simplicity of her plot with an artist’s alert and subtle eye for the small detail...Moggach’s writing is luminous.’

The Times
‘Sumptuous and enthralling...a passionate precision, a delight in the sensual that is reminiscent of Michèle Roberts... evoked with compassion, wit and humour’

Customer Reviews

Page-turning read
This is a fantastic, page-turning read, with believable characters and a truly believable, if somewhat surreal, plot. Natalie is working in a dead end job and yearns for something more when she hits upon a wonderful, although criminal, idea to make herself rich and hopefully happier. While she is busily defrauding the telecommunications company for which she works and having a great time with her newfound wealth, she has no idea how her actions are impinging on the fortunes and lives of innocent people. This gripping story with its fast-turning plot explores the thin line between morality and greed and how the smallest of actions, however we may try to justify them, can have horrifying consequences. Thoroughly recommended.

A terrific read, more subtle than it might initially appear
Moggach's theme here, as in the superb Tulip Fever, is the conflict between greed and love. Natalie is a pretty, ambitious girl working for Nu-Line telecommunications and fed up with her grotty life and dull boyfriend. She yearns for money, and one day gets the idea for a very simple fraud: all she has to do is find a husband with the right initials, and she can cash the cheques mistakenly made out in payment to the company to her own name. The consequences of her fraud ripple out, disastrously.
Less richly satisfying than Tulip Fever, this may disappoint those who wanted another historical novel. Moggach is much better at depicting artists and lovers than she is at making very ordinary, slightly squalid people interesting, but carries your interest by the quality of her style and plotting.

Gripping
I sat down one Saturday monring and read Final Demand cover to cover in one sitting, pausing only to make a cup of tea. I found it completely gripping.

Natalie is an accounts clerk who wants to escape from her dull life. Having her car stereo stolen one night sparks off a chain of events that she hopes will lead to a brighter, more exciting future. A money-making scam is launched and the story really gathers pace as she plunges headlong into a web of lies and deceit to achieve her goal. The plot in engrossing and I felt like shouting at Natalie to stop.

In the end, she goes too far with tragic consequences far more wide reaching than she could have possibly imagined. This is a rollercoaster of a read.