Muriel Spark
The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as "her spiny and treacherous masterpiece."
Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday — in search of passionate adventure and sex. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination.Where does art start or reality end?
Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world" at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association's pompous director steals Fleur's manuscript, fiction begins...College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school 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 his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, has already excited the interest of publishers.
...When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer...
Dame Muriel Spark delivers a delightfully alarming novel, full of high society and low cunning.
One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying "the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very momentSymposium was applauded...
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...
10) Memento mori
Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.
In late 1950s London, a group of aging eccentrics is brought together by a series of uncanny events. Lettie Colston is the first to receive an anonymous phone call from an insinuating voice reminding her that she must die. Soon, ten of Lettie's friends also receive the call. In the flurry that results
...The fraying fringes of 1950s literary London
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. Everywhere Mrs. Hawkins finds evil: with aplomb, however, she confidently sets about...14) The Bachelors
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
...15) Pitch Dark
“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”
Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone...