Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II “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 selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

He is standing in the middle of the room. She is sitting by the window, staring out over the East River. The late sunlight from the opposite window touches her shoulders and hair, it casts the shadow of palm leaves across the carpet, over her arm. The chair she sits in casts a shadow before her. There is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her. Behind her, and cast by what light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There's no light shining upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. What is she looking at? A round trip from present-day life in New York to war-time Intelligence work in England in 1944 and back again.

Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. Caroline has an unusual problem - she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters also seem deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - has his elderly grandmother hidden them there? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England's leading Satanist.

From Muriel Spark, the grande dame of literary satire, comes this swift, deliciously witty tale of writerly ambition that recalls her beloved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.College Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school located, for now, 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 Rowland’s creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a red-haired literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots, has already excited the interest of publishers. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse fraught with jealousy and attraction, both literary and sexual. From the Trade Paperback edition.

When an heiress moves to a villa on Italy’s Lake Nemi, a houseguest plots to take it—and more—in this novel by a prizewinning master of dark comedy. When American heiress Maggie Radcliffe relocates to enchanting Lake Nemi, just south of Rome, she is determined to live in tune with ancient pagan rhythms of art and nature. At her new home—one of three that she owns—she is constantly surrounded by a cast of quirky characters, and her latest guest is old friend Hubert Mallindaine, an unrepentant grifter who claims to be a direct descendant of the goddess Diana, whose spirit is said to rest at Nemi. As soon as Mallindaine arrives, Radcliffe’s vast material wealth begins to slip quietly out the door. Desperate to regain it, Radcliffe attempts to evict Mallindaine from her home, but a host of new problems threaten to destroy all that she has. From the PEN Award–winning author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Driver’s Seat, and other modern classics, The Takeover is a suspenseful, acidic comedy about the clash between the conventions of old wealth and the inevitable tide of modernity. It is a testament to the mind and work of “the most sharply original fictional imagination of our time” (Sunday Times). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

“The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon,” said The New York Times, and “never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe.” An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of “amorous green”) has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and—plunged into scandal—the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.

Tom Richards has fallen off a crane while directing his latest movie, 'The Hamburger Girl', fracturing some ribs and a hip. A comic procession of doctors, nurses, and relatives files through his hospital room. Another director replaces him at the studio, and everything in his cinematic dream is being changed - the screenplay, the title, the plot. Tom is baffled and furious. His children's marriages are coming apart, and who can be certain of his own? People everywhere are losing their jobs. His real life and his creative life become ever more displaced while he gradually recovers his health, his balance, and his natural imbalance. Tom's shrewd wife, Claire; their daughter Marigold, for whom Tom has ambivalent feelings; his beautiful daughter Cora, by his first marriage; and his lovers, family, friends, and colleagues all find themselves revolving in a sexual and economic maelstrom that gradually results in violence. "What we are doing, " Tom tells his film crew at last, "is real and not real. We are living in a world where dreams are reality and reality is dreams. In our world everything starts from a dream."

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, "Remember you must die." Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

A storm rages round the towers of the big house near Geneva. Behind the locked doors of the library, the Baron, the Baroness and their handsome young secretary are not to be disturbed. In the attic, the Baron's lunatic brother howls and hurls plates at his keeper. But in the staff quarters, all is under control. Under the personal supervision of Lister, the Baron's incomparable butler, the servants make their own, highly lucrative preparations for the tragedy. The night is long, but morning will bring a crime passionnel of outstanding attraction and endless possibilities. Muriel Spark has created a world in her own idiom - bizarre, gruesome and brilliantly funny.

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, and beauty.  Witty yet elegant, Territorial Rights is a celebration of human imperfection and complexity, with as many shifting identities, wardrobe changes, and sumptuous settings as a comic opera. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

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 convinces himself that Elsa's shadow always points in the wrong direction. As Paul and Elsa's involvement in World War II espionage begins to surface, the glitz and glamor of their lives is revealed to be nothing more than illusion. The Hothouse by the East River is a delirious satire of superficial urban life in the shadow of one of modern history's great horrors. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's archive at the National Library of Scotland.

The essays, reviews, memoirs and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. Grouped into four sections (Art and Poetry; Autobiography and Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics and Philosophy), they demonstrate the wide range of Muriel SparkOCOs knowledge and interests, and throw into relief the people, places and ideas that inspired her throughout her life as a working writer. The book includes perceptive essays on literary figures including the Bront1/2s, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson; engaging accounts of visits to John Masefield, Edith Sitwell, and Louis MacNeiceOCOs home (in the absence of its owner); and reflections on the sermons of Cardinal Newman and the Old Testament book of Job as perennially rich sources of spiritual nourishment. The novelistOCOs eye for the telling detail is evident in portraits of the cities ? Venice, Rome, Ravenna, Istanbul ? which Muriel Spark visited or in which she made her home. As Penelope Jardine puts it in her preface, this book ?tells many thingsOCO.T"