Böcker av Muriel Spark

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional school mistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a world of adult games that they will never forget.

A title written by the author of novels such as "Memento Mori" (1959), "The Ballad of Peckham Rye" (1960), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1961), "The Girls of Slender Means" (1963), and "Aiding and Abetting" (2000).

Edinburgh, 1930, and the world is on the brink of change. Leading the charge is the free-spirited Miss Jean Brodie, but while Miss Brodie manipulates and charms 'her girls' - known as the Brodie Set - with notions of romance and heroism, tragedy and a cruel betrayal beckon... The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of Muriel Spark's greatest novels.

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 putting things to order, to terrible effect.

So speaks the narrator of Muriel Spark''s haunting tale, ''The Leaf-sweeper'', before going on to recount the disturbing and mercilessly witty story of a certain ''madman'' - Johnnie Geddes, hell-bent on outlawing Christmas - who meets the most terrifying of all apparitions: himself.

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 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 conversationand 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).

In the seventy-three 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 also shows herself a master of unforgettable short poems. Before attaining fame as a novelist (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Muriel Spark was already an acclaimed poet. 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. As with all her creations, the poems show Spark to be "astonishingly talented and truly inimitable" (The San Francisco Chronicle).

January Marlow, a heroine 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, andperhapsmurder. 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 Murielin the last words of Robinson "immediately all things are possible."

"The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and-plunged into scandal-the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.

The first volume of the letters of Muriel Spark, one of the most fascinating and well-loved writers of the twentieth century - edited and published for the first time. In 1944 Muriel Spark was unknown as a writer except to a handful of close friends, returning to England after a disastrous marriage in Southern Rhodesia; by 1963 she was the internationally renowned author of seven critically acclaimed, bestselling novels including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Her letters - witty, affectionate, acid-tongued, mercurial - reveal the turbulence of her early career in postwar London, including her struggles to earn a living as a writer, her difficult relationships with Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford, a terrifying breakdown, and her conversion to Catholicism. They also trace her development from tentative poet to acclaimed novelist, with glittering insights into the emergence of her unique literary voice, as well as her relationships with friends, lovers, writers and publishers. Selected from her extensive correspondence and insightfully edited and annotated, this is an essential read for anyone interested in Spark's writing and mid-century literature.

Muriel Spark's timeless and eternally modern novel of power and influence, brought to life for a new age of readers in a stunning dyslexia-friendly edition.

Spiritualist and extortionist Patrick Seton is coming up for trial. He¿s been accused of forgery, and suddenly West London¿s bachelors are all in a tizzy. Described by Evelyn Waugh as the `cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark¿s clever and elegant books¿, The Bachelors is a biting comedy of English manners.This is one of the 22 novels written by Muriel Spark in her lifetime. All are being published by Polygon in hardback Centenary Editions between November 2017 and September 2018.

Caroline Rose has a problem. She hears voices and the incessant tapping of typewriter keys, and she seems to be a character in a novel . . . A comedy of errors, a crime novel, a book about books, Spark¿s debut remains as otherworldly and mischievous as it was when first published sixty years ago.The publishers acknowledge investment from Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book.Supported by the Muriel Spark Society.

The definitive short story collection from an unmistakable voice. Introduced by Janice Galloway

Now available as a stunning Canon'A work of glittering Sparkian ice, whose thinly frozen surface tempts you to jump up and down jovially above something deeper and darker' ALI SMITH

Anarchic, irreverent and razor-sharp, this new collection of Muriel Spark's satires confirms its creator as the mistress of British wit

Travel the continent with this new collection of Muriel Spark's European novels as your guide - an often surprising, occasionally moving, and always unfailingly funny trip

'I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Spark's clever and elegant books' Evelyn WaughNow available in print and eBook as a gorgeous canon

Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh with advanced ideas about the education of her charges. In this story of the 1930s, Miss Brodie is in her prime and the group of her favourite pupils, the creme de la creme or 'the Brodie Set' are growing up in a world that contains Hitler as well as love.

With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark's writings on the Bronte sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Bronte's poems.

When Barbara Vaughan's fianc joins an archaeological excursion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, she takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. It is 1961, and the nation of Israel is still in its infancy. For Barbara, a half-Jewish Catholic convert, this is a journey of faith, and she ignores warnings not to cross the Mandelbaum Gate from Israel into Jordan. An adventure of espionage and abduction, from pilgrimage to flight, The Mandelbaum Gate is one of Spark's most compelling novels, and won the James Tait Memorial Prize.

Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for an academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of lust, lies, blackmail, cocktail parties and regicide. As he chases Lina, his heart's desire, the city itself provides a priceless education in love, art and beauty.

Annabel Christopher is every inch the star: a glamorous actress with a devoted, handsome husband. To keep the paparazzi and her adoring public under her spell, her perfect image must be carefully cultivated, whatever the cost. Beneath the facade, though, her husband cannot bear her or their vapid existence. Envious of her success, he plots his revenge and stages a scandal even Annabel will find a challenge to recover from.

Spark's poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark - and light - music beneath the mundane.