Library

The Comforters

Muriel SparkSpark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debutWith easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

The Informed Air: Essays

Muriel SparkTogether for the first time in one sparkling, delicious volume, here are the greatest essays of Muriel SparkA fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontës, Mary Shelley); Piero della Francesca; life in wartime London and in glamorous “Hollywood-on-the-Tiber;” 1960s Rome; faith; and parties (on her first New Year’s Eve, as a baby sipping her mother’s sherry: “I always loved a party”).

Spark’s scope is amazing, and her striking, glancing insights are precise and unforgettable. From the mysteries of Job’s sufferings, she glides to Dame Edith Sitwell’s cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty publisher, and on to the joys of success.

The Novels of Muriel Spark: Volume 2 Two

Muriel SparkHere, in two handsome volumes, are ten celebrated novels by the author acclaimed as "the best English novelist writing today" (Times Literary Supplement). Available singly and as a boxed set, The Novels of Muriel Spark is both a collector's item for Spark's loyal following and an ideal introduction for new readers. Volume 1 begins with Spark's best-selling The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), whose Scottish schoolmistress remains one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction, and follows it with The Comforters, her first novel (1957), The Only Problem (1984), The Driver's Seat (1970), and Memento Mori (1959), a comic and macabre study of old age. Volume 2 continues with Loitering with Intent (1981), a fascinating story of how art and life imitate each other; The Girls of Slender Means (1963), whose resourceful young heroines of war-ravaged London are of Spark's own generation; The Abbess of Crewe (1973), the tale of a Watergate-style power struggle ingeniously set in a conven

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Driver's Seat, The Only Problem

Muriel Spark(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The brevity of Muriel Spark’s novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.

Spark’s most celebrated novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher’s catastrophic effect on her pupils. The Girls of Slender Means is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. The Driver’s Seat follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And The Only Problem is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.

All four novels give evidence of one of the most original and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.