Muriel Spark Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Comforters (1957)
  2. Memento Mori (1958)
  3. Robinson (1958)
  4. The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
  5. The Bachelors (1960)
  6. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
  7. The Girls of Slender Means (1963)
  8. The Quest for Lavishes Ghast (1964)
  9. The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
  10. The Public Image (1968)
  11. Very Fine Clock (1969)
  12. The Driver’s Seat (1970)
  13. Not to Disturb (1971)
  14. The Hothouse by the East River (1973)
  15. The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
  16. The Takeover (1976)
  17. Territorial Rights (1979)
  18. Loitering with Intent (1981)
  19. The Only Problem (1984)
  20. A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)
  21. Symposium (1990)
  22. Reality and Dreams (1996)
  23. Aiding and Abetting (2000)
  24. The Finishing School (2004)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. Doctors of Philosophy (1963)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. All the Stories of Muriel Spark (1958)
  2. The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories (1958)
  3. All the Poems of Muriel Spark (1967)
  4. Collected Stories 1 (1968)
  5. Bang-bang You’re Dead and Other Stories (1981)
  6. Going Up To Sotheby’s and Other Poems (1982)
  7. The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985)
  8. The Collected Stories of Muriel Spark (1994)
  9. The Portobello Road and Other Stories (1995)
  10. The Complete Short Stories (2001)
  11. The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life & Other Stories (2001)
  12. Selected Stories (2001)
  13. The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark (2003)
  14. Complete Poems (2015)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Emily Brontë (1960)
  2. Child of Light (1987)
  3. Mary Shelley (1987)
  4. Curriculum Vitae (1992)
  5. John Masefield (1992)
  6. The Essence Of The Brontës (1993)
  7. The Letters Of The Brontes (2011)
  8. Walking on Air (2012)
  9. The Golden Fleece (2014)
  10. The Informed Air (2014)
  11. A Good Comb (2018)
  12. The Observing Eye (2018)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Open to the Public (1997)

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Muriel Spark Books Overview

The Comforters

In Muriel Spark’s fantastic first novel, the only things that aren’t ambiguous are her matchless originality and glittering wit.

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, 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.

Robinson

A suspense novel about three castaways marooned on an island owned by an eccentric recluse. January Marlow, a hero*ine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson‘s island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as ‘an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it.’ In Robinson, Muriel Spark’s wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, and perhaps murder. Everything astounds, confounds, and convinces, frighteningly. ‘She is,’ as Charles Alva Hoyt once put it, ‘the Jane Austen of the Surrealists.’ Robinson, a unique and marvelous novel, is another display of the powers of ‘the most gifted and innovative British novelist’ The New York Times. In the work of Dame Muriel in the last words of Robinson ‘immediately all things are possible.’

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

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.

The Bachelors

‘Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors. Half pint bottles of milk began to be stood at the doorsteps of houses containing single apartments from Hampstead Heath to Greenwich Park, from Wanstead Flats to Putney Heath; but especially in Hampstead, especially in Kensington.’ So begins Muriel Spark’s supreme 1960 novel The Bachelors. Our very British bachelors come in every stripe: a barrister, a British councilman, a detective, a very curious ‘priest,’ a hand writing expert, a terrifyingly blank spiritual medium, and a guilt torn good Irish Catholic boy who chews onions to inhibit any success with the opposite sex. Though we first find them contentedly chatting in clubs and shopping at Fortnum’s, their cozy bachelor world is not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously, individually tormented defrauded or stolen from; blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid seances until, finally, they realize they are about to be plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that lawsuit, about to face the dock as well as the prospect of unwanted fatherhood, hovers pale Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size descend upon our poor bachelors from the rising price of frozen peas ‘Your hand’s never out of your pocket’ to epileptic fits, musings about murder, and spiritualist mouths foaming with protoplasm. And every horror delights: each is limned by Spark’s uncanny wit at once surreal, malicious, funny, and ultimately serious. The Bachelors presents ‘the most gifted and innovative British novelist’ The New York Times at her wicked best.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Adapted from the novel by Muriel SparkComedy /4m, 15f / Platform setMiss Brodie is a teacher, a formidable figure who molds young minds to her form. And what is more, she is so intensely interesting that the girls admire her above all else. But Miss Brodie is not honest. She prevaricates and then tells the girls to do as she tells them, not as she does herself. She is having an affair with the music teacher and has had one with the art teacher, and this is not the most exemplary conduct. A fantastic letter which some of her students write in her name to her lover falls into the headmistress’ hands. Dismissal is averted by Miss Brodie’s indomitable pluck as she threatens to sue for calumny. One girl grows too wise too soon and turns on Miss Brodie.’Fascinating in its insights into a marvelously portrayed eccentric human being.’ N.Y. Times’Endearing hilarious, lovely, perceptive and splendid.’ N.Y. Daily News’A dramatic intelligent and merciless study of character. ‘ N.Y. Post

The Girls of Slender Means

‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions,’ begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame 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 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. The novel’s harrowing ending reveals that the girls’ giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called ‘one of this century’s finest creators of comic metaphysical entertainment.’

The Mandelbaum Gate

This is the Audiobook CASSETTE Library Edition in vinyl case. The Mandelbaum Gate divides the conflict torn realm of Jerusalem, separating Israel from Jordan. Barbara Vaughan, a stubborn young Englishwoman and half Jewish Catholic convert, insists upon crossing the divide in order to rendezvous with her fianc , in spite of the very real danger. Not even the threat of bodily harm and fearful admonishments of staid British diplomat Freddy Hamilton can dissuade Barbara from her ill timed pilgrimage. Her quest sets off a series of bizarre situations and adventures, set against the backdrop of the Eichmann trial of 1961. In The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark has created a many faceted novel, both comic and serious, enriched by a wealth of information.

The Public Image

Annabel Christopher is a goddess to her adoring Italian public, her loving husband part of her perfect image. To keep the eager sycophants, ruthless paparazzi and anxious admirers under her spell the image must be carefully cultivated. Only Annabel hasn’t calculated on the plans of her husband.

The Driver’s Seat

Lise, driven to distraction by an office job, leaves everything and flies south on holiday in search of passionate adventure, the obsessional experience and sex. Infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in the unnamed southern city.

The Hothouse by the East River

In 1973 Paul and Elsa are living in New York. In 1944 they were both involved in intelligence work in England, and with the arrival in New York of Helmut Kiel, one time German POW and lover of Elsa, their past returns to haunt them.

The Abbess of Crewe

An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity. This is a satirical fantasy about ecclesiastical and other kinds of politics. The author has also written ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ and ‘Girls of Slender Means’.

The Takeover

In the cool, historic sanctuary of Nemi rests the spirit of Diana, the Benevolent Malign Goddess whose priests once stalked the sacred grove. Now Hubert Mallindaine, self styled descendent of the Italian huntress, has claimed spiritual rights to a villa at Nemi a villa with a view to kill.

Loitering with Intent

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 the grubby edge of the literary world,’ as secretary to the peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs, hilariously writing their memoirs in advance or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? Rich material, in any case. But when its pompous director, Sir Quentin Oliver, steals the manuscript of Fleur’s new novel, fiction begins to appropriate life. The association’s members begin to act out scenes exactly as Fleur herself has already written them in her missing manuscript. And as they meet darkly funny, pre visioned fates, where does art start or reality end? ‘A delicious conundrum,’ The New Statesman called Loitering with Intent.

A Far Cry from Kensington

Set on the crazier fringes of 1950s literary London, A Far Cry from Kensington is a delight, hilariously portraying love, fraud, death, evil, and transformation. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand, and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. There, as a fat and much admired young war widow, she spent 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 uncovered evil: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide. With aplomb, however, Mrs. Hawkins confidently set about putting things to order, little imagining the mayhem which would ensue. Now decades older, thin, successful, and delighted with life in Italy quite A Far Cry from Kensington Mrs. Hawkins looks back to all those dark doings, and recounts how her own life changed forever. She still, however, loves to give advice: ‘It’s easy to get thin. You eat and drink the same as always, only half…
.I offer this advice without fee; it is included in the price of this book.’ A masterwork by ‘Britain’s greatest living novelist’ Sunday Telegraph, 1999, A Far Cry from Kensington has been hailed as ‘outstanding’ The Observer and ‘wickedly and adroitly executed’The New York Times. ‘Far Cry is, among other things, a comedy that holds a tragedy as an egg cup holds an egg’ Philadelphia Inquirer.

Symposium

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 flamb 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 moment Symposium was applauded by Time magazine for the ‘sinister elegance’ of Muriel Spark’s ‘medium of light but lethal comedy.’ Mixed in are a Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent a butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman a classic sweet faced hair raising Sparkian horror who has married rich Hilda’s son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod’s. There is also spiritual conversation and the Bordeaux is superb. ‘The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists’ world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives . No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly.’ The Independent on Sunday.

Reality and Dreams

From the author of SYMPOSIUM and THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE, a novel in which a film director, who is injured while making his latest film, watches his friends and family from his hospital bed as they rush around in the chaos of their lives.

Aiding and Abetting

Muriel Spark, one of Britain’s greatest living novelists, returns to the literary stage with her most wickedly amusing and subversive novel in years, a savagely witty tale of murder and escape based on the notorious real life case of Lord Lucan.A dissolute member of the British aristocracy, ‘Lucky’ Lucan has been missing since he accidentally murdered his children’s nanny in an abortive attempt on his wife’s life. His puzzling disappearance in the mid seventies created a sensation in Britain and a tantalizing mystery as yet unsolved. In Muriel Spark’s daring and sophisticated fictional version of Lucan’s flight, his adversary is Beate Pappenheim, a fake Bavarian stigmatic who embezzled millions from devout followers before assuming a new identity as a celebrated psychiatrist. These two inhabitants of the farther shores of morality collide memorably in Spark’s brilliant new novel, where ‘Aiding and Abetting‘ Lord Lucan’s well padded fugitive life is the name of the beastly upper class game, and a duel of wits plays out with potentially mortal consequences. The artful murderer meets the master con woman, but who will emerge victorious? In part a rumination on the nature of evil, in part a damning indictment of upper class mores, Aiding and Abetting is a dark and dazzling entertainment from a writer whose clear eyed judgments never intrude upon her narrative legerdemain. Here is proof beyond doubt that Muriel Spark retains her crown as the most distinguished and entertaining moral satirist of her day.

The Finishing School

The lethally witty and morally penetrating new novel by one of the world’s most admired writersCollege Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school located 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. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse not free of sexual jealousy and attraction. Nobody writing has a keener instinct than Muriel Spark for hypocrisy, self delusion and moral ambiguity, or a more deliciously satirical eye. The Finishing School is certain to be another Spark landmark, an addition to one of the world s most lauded and entertaining bodies of work.

All the Stories of Muriel Spark

Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions’ original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public. This new and complete paperback edition now contains every one of her forty one marvelous stories, catnip for all Spark fans. All the Stories of Muriel Spark spans Dame Muriel Spark’s entire career to date and displays all her signature stealth, originality, beauty, elegance, wit, and shock value. No writer commands so exhilarating a style playful and rigorous, cheerful and venomous, hilariously acute and coolly supernatural. Ranging from South Africa to the West End, her dazzling stories feature hanging judges, fortune tellers, shy girls, psychiatrists, dress designers, pensive ghosts, imaginary chauffeurs, and persistent guests. Regarding one story ‘The Portobello Road’, Stephen Schiff said in The New Yorker: ‘Muriel Spark has written some of the best sentences in English. For instance: ‘He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.’ It’s a nasty piece of work, that sentence.’

All the Poems of Muriel Spark

Available at last are all the poems by one of the twentieth century’s greatest British writers, Dame Muriel Spark: ‘a true literary artist, acerbic and exhilarating’ London Evening Standard. Before attaining fame as a novelist Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark was already an acclaimed poet. In the seventy poems collected here, Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels, epigrams, and even the tour de force of a twenty one page ballad. She shows herself a master of unforgettable short poems. The ‘power and control’ of her poetry, as Publishers Weekly remarked, ‘is almost startling.’ With the vitality and wit typical of all her work, Dame Muriel has never stopped writing poems, which frequently appear in The New Yorker.

The Young Man Who Discovered the Secret of Life & Other Stories

Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift giving, and both are packaged in a clear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.

The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark

Eight spooky stories from the mistress of the unexpected.

‘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 perhaps may not even be aware of being a ghost at all. One in fact is the ghost of a man who isn’t even dead yet. Another takes the bus home from work, believing she is still alive, though she is haunted by an odious tune stuck in her head which her murderer had been relentlessly humming, and distressed by a ‘feeling of incompletion.’ And a reflective ghost recalls her mortal days of enjoying ‘the glory of the world, as if it would never pass.’

Spark has a flair for confiding ghosts: ‘I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one’s executors can never do properly.’ In her case the odd things include cheerily hailing her murderer, ‘Hallo George!’ and driving him mad.

The remarkably nonchalant stories here include some of her most wicked and famous ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi,’ ‘The Hanging Judge,’ and ‘The Portobello Road’ and they all gleam with that special Spark sheen, the quality The Times Literary Supplement has hailed as ‘gloriously witty and polished.’

Mary Shelley

At 16, Mary Wollstonecraft shocked England when she ran away with her married lover, the tempestuous, brilliant poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. then, at 20, she secured her place in history by writing ‘Frankenstein’, now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics of all time. This biography recounts the life and loves of this legendary woman, from her youth as the daughter of a philosopher and a pioneering feminist, through her passionate, turbulent marriage, and her career as a writer and editor.

Curriculum Vitae

This autobiography, now in paperback, offers a wonderfully vivid account of the people and places that inspired so much of Muriel Spark’s writing, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Here, readers will find high comedy, betrayal, rigorous intelligence, the odd twist of faith, and mysterious grace all the elements that have delighted her readers for more than 35 years. Photos.

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