I aim to startle as well as please," Muriel Spark has said, and in these eight marvelous ghost stories she manages to do both to the highest degree. As with all matters in the hands of Dame Muriel her spooks are entirely original. A ghost in her pantheon can be plaintive or a bit vengeful, or perhap[...]

A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontes, Mary Shelley); Piero della Francesca; life in wartime London and in glamorous "Hollywood-on-the-Tiber;" 1960s Rome; faith; and parties (on her firs[...]

At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching methods, in her attraction to the married art master, Teddy Lloyd, in her affai[...]

Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie includes an introduction by Candia McWilliam in Penguin Modern Classics. Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative char[...]

Muriel Spark's classic "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged "Penguin Essentials" edition. 'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life...' Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a tea[...]

In Aiding and Abetting," "the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England's most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the "aiders and abetters" who kept him on the loose.
When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildeg[...]

The last months of World War II bring unforgettable experiences to the residents of a young spinsters' club in Londons' West End[...]

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 intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur finds a job "on t[...]

First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented -- defrauded or stolen from, blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid seances -- and then plunged into the nasti[...]

With 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.[...]

Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. E[...]

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.[...]

Muriel Spark's arch, subversive novel entertains us with its amusing, nostalgic evocation of the 1930s schooldays of a group of middle-class Edinburgh girls - then forces us to face up to the easy surface charms, and darker undercurrents, of Miss Jean Brodie's perfect self-assurance. David Robb's[...]