New Directions Classic

7 primary works

Loitering with Intent

by Muriel Spark

Published 22 May 1981

A funny and clever novel about art and reality and the way they imitate each other, from the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. With an introduction by Mark Lawson.

Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty, irascible Sir Quentin Oliver at the Autobiographical Association, whose members are all at work on their memoirs. When her employer gets his hands on Fleur's novel-in-progress, mayhem ensues as its scenes begin coming true... Spark's inimitable style make this literary joyride thoroughly appealing.

'The most gloriously entertaining novel since The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.' AN Wilson, Spectator

'I read this book in a delirium of delight ... robust and full-bodied, a wise and mature work, and a brilliantly mischievous one.' New York Times Book Review

A Far Cry from Kensington

by Muriel Spark

Published 21 March 1988

Mrs Hawkins, a fat young war widow worked for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher in 1950s London. Looking back on shady literary doings and a deadly enemy, anonymous letters, blackmail and suicide, the thin and successful Mrs Hawkins recalls how she came through it all.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

by Muriel Spark

Published 25 July 1974

Dougal Douglas, M.A., was hired to bring vision into the lives of the workers in a Peckham Firm. And he did. To Peckham he introduced the wider horizon of tears, absenteism, fraud, blackmail, violence, and murder. With a light laugh, of course, for Dougal was born with the horns on his head.

Memento Mori

by Muriel Spark

Published 29 March 1973

Dame Lettie Colston, 79 and pioneer penal reformer, has much in common with the elderly residents of the Maud Long Medical Ward. All are united by scorn, resentment, boredom - and the humour that masks the awareness of impending death. Then the insidious telephone calls begin.

The Bachelors: Novel

by Muriel Spark

Published 2 March 2007

First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented — defrauded or stolen from; blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid séances — and then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors — from the rising price of frozen peas ("Your hand's never out of your pocket") to epileptic fits, forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder. And every horror delights: each is lit up by Spark's uncanny wit — at once malicious, funny, and deadly serious. The Bachelors shows "the most gifted and innovative British novelist" (The New York Times) at her wicked best.

The Girls Of Slender Means

by Muriel Spark

Published 1 December 1963

'It never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.'

The May of Teck Club 'exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years'. Nevertheless, and though there is a war on, they find the time between elocution lessons to jostle one another over suitors (some more suitable than others) and a single Schiaparelli gown. But can a love of literature, fine clothes and amorous young men save these young ladies from the horrors of the real world?

'Unsettling and exhilarating' William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

'An enduring genius' Guardian

Robinson

by Muriel Spark

Published September 1964

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."