Muriel Spark

Author Information
Muriel Spark's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    29 Books
  • First Book:
    June 1964
  • Latest Book:
    December 2016
  • Author Rating:
  • Share:

Book List in Order: 29 titles

  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    ''One of the greatest books about growing up'' James Wood, Guardian

    ''You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime''

    Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress with a difference. She is proud, cultured and romantic but he...

  • Collected Stories 1

  • The Driver's Seat

    The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as “her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.” Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday -- in search of passionate adventure and sex. I...

  • 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. L...

  • Not to Disturb

    Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb. A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle ...

  • 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. “The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon,” said The New York Times, and “never more so...

  • The Public Image

    "All homage to Muriel Spark, the coolest writer ever to scald your liver and your lights" (The Washington Post). The Public Image, which the author has called "an ethical shocker," provides a scalding the reader is unlikely to forget, particularly as...

  • 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 vi...



  • The Only Problem

    Harvey Gotham, a wealthy man in his midthirties writing a monograph on the "Book of Job," is told by police that his wife Effie, a member of a terrorist group, has bombed banks and commited murder and he finds that he loves Effie all the more...

  • Spark

  • A Far Cry from Kensington

    The fraying fringes of 1950s literary London 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 ...

  • Loitering With Intent

    Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Associa...

  • The Ballad of Peckham Rye

    A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times) The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a wickedly farcical tale of an English factory town turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Doug...

  • Memento Mori

    Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon th...

  • The Bachelors

    Spark’s very British bachelors come in every stripe First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented -- de...

  • The Mandelbaum Gate

    Barbara, engaged to an archaeologist, has pursued the beauty and danger of a life of faith. On a visit to Jerusalem she has befriended the diplomat Freddy Hamilton. Ignoring his warning that she risks arrest because of her Jewish blood, she has set o...

  • 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 (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent a...

  • Reality and Dreams

    Acclaimed by the likes of John Updike and Gore Vidal, the author's twentieth novel unveils the sexual secrets, eccentric imagination, and troubled family life of a film director, in a voice at once sinister and sympathetic. Reprint. 10,000 first prin...



  • Aiding and Abetting

    In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loo...

  • 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 ...

  • The Complete Short Stories

    From the cruel irony of 'A member of the Family' to the fateful echoes of 'The Go-Away Bird' and the unexpectedly sinister 'The Girl I Left Behind Me', in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark coolly probes the...

  • Robinson

    A suspense novel about three castaways marooned on an island owned by an eccentric recluse. 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,...

  • 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 Mu...

  • The Finishing School

    From Muriel Spark, the grande dame of literary satire, comes this swift, deliciously witty tale of writerly ambition that recalls her beloved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.College Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school...

  • The Comforters

    Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut 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....

  • The Snobs

  • Doctors of Philosophy

    Excerpt from Doctors of Philosophy: A Play

    Catherine. I thought she might like to look at the water as it isn't term-time. I quite see that during term a thing like the Regent's Canal would be an idea to Leonora, it would be a geographical and hi...

  • Territorial Rights

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Layers of intrigue; triangulating love affairs; murders; international spy-craft; adultery; parental interference; the sweet careless rapture of youth; unmarked graves - Territorial Rights claims much ground and Muriel Spark enjoys a wicked dance ...



Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Muriel Spark has published 29 books.

Muriel Spark does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Doctors of Philosophy, was published in December 2016.

The first book by Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was published in June 1964.

No. Muriel Spark does not write books in series.
No ads, please...

$20 / year

FictionDB Premium Membership

Subscribe