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(0)Muriel Spark
2) Memento mori
Author
Summary
Elderly Lettie Colston receives an anonymous phone call reminding her that she must die. Soon ten of Lettie's friends also get the call. A bizarre investigation reveals a network of deception that binds together the group of aging eccentrics.
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Formats
Summary
Touched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa’s relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of war In 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul...
Author
Formats
Summary
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...
Author
Pub. Date
1988
Summary
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...
Author
Pub. Date
1981
Summary
“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...
Author
Pub. Date
1963
Summary
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...
Author
Pub. Date
[1960]
Summary
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,...
10) Not to disturb
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume NDP1180
Pub. Date
2010
Summary
Behind the locked doors of the library, the Baron, the Baroness and their handsome young secretary are not to be disturbed. In the attic, the Baron's lunatic brother howls and hurls plates at his keeper. But in the staff quarters, all is under control. The night is long, but morning will bring a crime passion. Set in Lake Geneva, Switzerland.
