This classic is the darkly intriguing story of an eccentric Scottish teacher and the intense relationship she develops with her students. While her outspoken praise for art, passion, and daring inspire an almost cult-like reverence in her young protégées, her politics and frank sensuality lead ultimately to her downfall.
Famous novel made into a cult film, and one of only 25 books chosen for the first ever World BookNight in 2011. A liberated young schoolteacher at an Edinburgh girls' school during the 1930's instructs her girls on the ways of life. Ignoring the more mundane subjects, she teaches them of love, politics and art, with some shocking consequences.
The Mandelbaum Gate divides the conflict-torn realm of Jerusalem, separating Israel from Jordan. Barbara Vaughn, a stubborn young English woman and half-Jewish Catholic convert, insists upon crossing the divide in order to rendezvous with her fiancé, in spite of the very real danger. Her quest sets off a series of bizarre situations and adventures, set against the backdrop of the Eichmann trial of 1961.
Muriel Spark has created a many-faceted novel, both comic and serious, enriched by a wealth of information.
"[Davidson] achieve[s] successful transitions through deliberate pauses and changes of voice. Thus, we're able to follow the many tangents the author uses to enrich the story and our listening pleasure."-AudioFile
Thus begins Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club building itself-"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"-its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal, practicing elocution and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. But the novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.
"One of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."-New York Times
The Girls of Slender Means is the third Muriel Spark audio release of 2012, following The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Complete Short Stories. It is 1945; a time of cultural and political change, and also one of slender means. Spark's evocative and sharply drawn novel focuses on a group of women living together in a hostel in Kensington who face new challenges in uncertain times. The novel is at once dramatic and character-based, and shows Muriel Spark at the height of her literary powers.
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 her keen instinct for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and moral ambiguity.
Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice, and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men. One is delighted with her company, the other is deeply perturbed. So begins an unnerving journey into the darker recesses of human nature.
Read by Dame Judi Dench, rediscover this shocking masterpiece in audiobook on the 100th anniversary of Muriel Spark's birth.
The Complete Short Stories is a collection to be loved and cherished, from one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century. All stories performed unabridged by three star readers: Juliet Stevenson, Richard E. Grant and Emilia Fox.
The Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical fable of a blue-collar town turned upside down.
When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a. Douglas Dougal) to do "human research" into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up. In fact, this Music Man of the thoroughly modern corporation changes the lives of all the eccentric characters he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to V.R. Druce, unsuspecting Managing Director.
This is Dame Muriel Spark at her most devilishly piquant.
"We are never out of touch, in a Spark novel, with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of magic and wit, the cunning tautness of suspense."-John Updike, The New Yorker
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 then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors-from epileptic fits to forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder-and each horror delights, lit up by Spark's uncanny wit, at once malicious, funny, and deadly serious.
Award-winning British author Dame Muriel Spark is internationally renowned for her witty and engaging tales of life. Short and sophisticated, Reality and Dreams follows the career of self-centered, middle-aged film director Tom Richards. As he turns colorful incidents from his life into glittery, cinematic fiction, his foreboding dreams become all too real. Tom is passionately directing his latest film when he falls from a crane on the set. Awaking in a semi-conscious fog in a hospital room, he suddenly must deal with a comic, surreal procession of doctors, nurses, and out-of-work relatives. In a drugged daze, he dreams of ways to change his life. But some of his hazy visions come true as he recovers, causing Tom's real world to unravel into a distorted soap opera. Muriel Spark is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize. Her tantalizing story, Reality and Dreams, won the Arts Council Spring Book Award. With narrator Jenny Sterlin's expert pacing, all of the delicious surprises and the unsettling wisdom in this dark, contemporary comedy burst from the pages.
På en flickskola i mellankrigstidens Edinburgh samlar Miss Jean Brodie en frigjord, passionerad och högst målmedveten lärarinna en skara noggrant handplockade elever: de allra, allra bästa, hennes flickor, Brodies gäng.
De mer konventionella skolämnena får ge vika för kärlek, politik och konst, och Miss Jean Brodie gör allt för att forma flickorna till starka och oberoende kvinnor. Samtidigt har hon kärleksaffärer med två av skolans manliga lärare, varav den ena är gift. »Tryggheten är inte det viktigaste«, manar hon sina elever. »Godhet, Sanning och Skönhet är det viktigaste. Följ mig.« Och det gör de. Men en av flickorna ska komma att förråda henne.
Förord av Andres Lokko
MURIEL SPARK [1918-2006] är en skotsk romanförfattare och poet vars produktiva författarskap tillhör de verkligt säregna och betydande från det brittiska 1900-talets andra hälft. Romanen Miss Jean Brodies bästa år [The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961] blev hennes stora genombrott och är fortfarande hennes mest lästa och omtyckta bok.
