A teacher at a girls' school in Edinburgh during the 1930s comes into conflict with school authorities because of her unorthodox teaching methods, in a new edition--which includes author biography and publication history--of a novel o...

Elderly Lettie Colston receives an anonymous phone call reminding her that she must die. Soon ten of Lettie's friends also get the call. A bizarre investigation reveals a network of deception that binds together the group of aging ecc...

Set on the crazier fringes of 1950s literary London, A Far Cry from Kensington is a delight, hilariously portraying love, fraud, death, evil, and transformation. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes ...

This is Sparks witty portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. While the young women do their best to act as if the world were back to normal, their giddy peregrinations hide some tragic war wo...

Muriel Spark in prime form: one of her most enjoyable, complex, and instructive jeux d'esprit. 'How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,' Fleur Talbot rejoices. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with ...

The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as "her spiny and treacherous masterpiece." Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday — in search of passionate adv...

Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions,' begins The Girls of Slender Means Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of W...

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,...