Muriel Spark

A teacher at a girls' school in Edinburgh, Scotland, Miss Jean Brodie was a woman of ideas, wit, and charm who had a lover. The students she chose as her special friends were called the "Brodie set." One of them would betray her.

Mrs. Hawkins, a buxom young war widow, 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. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovers evil-- shady literary doings and a deadly enemy, anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide. Mrs. Hawkins confidently sets about putting things to order, little imagining the mayhem which would ensue. Now decades...

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...

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...

When a young English woman, a half-Jewish Catholic convert, insists upon crossing over from Israel into Jordan, she sets off a series of bizarre situations.

“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...

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,...

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...

Traces the life of Mary Shelley, describes her relationship with her poet husband, and discusses her own literary achievements.