Muriel Spark

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.

“Sleek and suggestive . . . [Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you’ve accepted a world gone utterly awry.” —Kirkus Reviews
British film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not—and...

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...

"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.

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The time is now, the place is Italy, particularly the enchanted lake at Nemi, southeast of Rome, where the Temple of Diana once stood. The people form an extraordinary frieze of votaries of love and money, with the goddess-like American heiress Maggie at the center, justly famed for her beauty, her wealth, and the steeliness of her will -- Amazon.com.

The malign influence upon an English manufacturing town of a persuasive Scot, who is once ghost writer, industrial psychologist, and demon.

The zany lives and morals of the girls of the "May of Teck Club", a haven for young ladies, in 1945, when "all the nice people of England were poor, allowing for exceptions."

Memento mori: "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." The ballad...

In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability...