Muriel Spark
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“A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune).
“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie...
“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie...
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Touched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa’s relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of war In 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul...
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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,...
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British film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not-and with no idea who to trust. Soon his wife, children, and friends are all undergoing crises of their own, from the breakup of a marriage to the loss of a job. As Richard fights to regain his health and stay centered amid the swirling...
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The only play by famed Scottish author Muriel Spark takes on the dilemmas of two intellectually ambitious women in 1960s England In a home overlooking London's Regent's Canal in the 1960s, two scholars debate the choices they have made with their lives. Catherine Delfont was one of the most promising minds of her generation, but after earning her PhD she gave up her research to marry a well-regarded economist and raise a family. Her cousin Leonora...
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Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for a staid academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of lust, lies, blackmail, cocktail parties, and regicide. As he chases Lina, his heart's desire, the city itself provides a priceless education in love, art,...
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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,...
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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...
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Heiress Maggie Radcliffe owns three glamorous villas overlooking Lake Nemi-and one houseguest will stop at nothing to take it all When American heiress Maggie Radcliffe relocates to the enchanting Lake Nemi, just south of Rome, she does so wishing to live in tune with ancient pagan rhythms of art and nature. Constantly surrounded by a cast of quirky characters, Radcliffe finds her latest guest in the form of old friend-and unrepentant grafter-Hubert...
10) Robinson
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Español
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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...
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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 us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. There, as a fat and much admired young war widow, she spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher (“of very good books”) and...
12) Memento Mori
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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 eccentrics.
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Thus begins Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. 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...
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College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he writes, somewhat falteringly, a novel. Enter seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose novel-in-progress already has publishers interested. The result is a mix of keen envy and a game of cat and mouse not free of sexual jealousy and attraction. Here Muriel Spark displays...
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The Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical fable of a blue-collar town turned upside down. When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a. Douglas Dougal) to do “human research” into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up. In fact, this Music Man of the thoroughly modern corporation changes the lives of all the eccentric characters he meets,...
16) The Bachelors
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A barrister, a “priest,” a detective, a lovelorn Irishman, a handwriting expert, a heinous spiritual medium…the very British bachelors of Muriel Spark's supreme 1960 novel come in every stripe. First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented—defrauded, stolen from, blackmailed, or pressed to attend horrid séances—and...
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Dame Muriel Spark has written 21 novels. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1993 and Commandeur de L'Ordre Arts et des Lettres in 1996. Aiding and Abetting, based on an actual murder case, becomes a fascinating mystery under Spark's sharp pen. Lord Lucan disappeared in 1974, shortly after murdering his children's nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. Despite reports of sightings, no one knows for sure where the crafty fugitive...
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“How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century,” Fleur Talbot rejoices. Loitering about London in 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world,” as secretary to the odd Autobiographical Association. Are they a group of mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing their memoirs in advance—or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? Rich material, in any case. But...
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A wonderful selection of fictional detectives, all together in one superb collection of unabridged short stories. Find Sherlock Holmes with his long suffering colleague, Dr. Watson, in The Dying Detective, Father Brown as a witness in court in The Man in the Passage and everyone's favourite Inspector Morse in The Burglar. Appreciate Dame Muriel Spark's foray into the genre in Chimes and meet Nigel Strangeways, C. Day Lewis' (here writing as Nicholas...