Muriel Spark

In the classic work that launched a play, a movie, and a song, Muriel Spark tells the darkly intriguing story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher and the intense relationship she develops with six of her students. The scandalously outspoken Miss Brodie makes big waves in the conservative Scottish school, preaching the value of art, passion, and daring. While her bold values inspire an almost cult-like reverence in her young protégées, her politics,...

Like the May of Teck Club building itself--"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"--its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal, practicing elocution and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. But the novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.

For Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discovery   Barbara Vaughn is a scholarly woman whose fascination with religion stems partly from a conversion to Catholicism, and partly from her own half-Jewish background. When her boyfriend joins an archaeological excursion to search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Vaughn takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. But this is 1960,...

Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.

In late 1950s London, a group of aging eccentrics is brought together by a series of uncanny events. Lettie Colston is the first to receive an anonymous phone call from an insinuating voice reminding her that she must die. Soon, ten of Lettie's friends also receive the call. In the flurry that results

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College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, has already excited the interest of publishers.

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Spark's 1970 novel of a woman gone mad was dubbed "so stark as to be nightmarish" by The New Yorker. The story details the last day of protagonist Lise, who, while on holiday in Europe, is about to be murdered.

In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability...

A wealthy academic's life shatters when his estranged wife becomes the suspected leader of a terrorist organization   Having led a successful, comfortable life, Harvey Gotham retires to the French countryside to pursue bookish obsessions-namely, a long monograph on the Book of Job, the biblical narrative of faith in the face of extraordinary suffering. But Gotham's intellectual interests soon bleed into his daily life when a series of misfortunes,...

Con gracia paradójica, la novela de Muriel Spark afina y condensa la diferencia entre géneros tan disímiles como el thriller y los manuales de autoayuda y se anticipa además a las previsiones en temas relacionados con el placer de la lectura. Satisface todas las expectativas porque contiene las claves para vencer el insomnio, para adelgazar, para tener fuerza de voluntad, para concentrarse y escribir una novela y para tratar con maridos. El éxito...

The essays, reviews, memoirs, and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. The Golden Fleece, which takes its title from Spark's first published essay, has four sections, Art & Poetry; Autobiography & Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics & Philosophy, forming a kind of oblique autobiography, an evolving confession of a powerful individual faith in the human and what transcends...