Spark’s Europe Not to Disturb: The Takeover: The Only Problem
- 4 Aug 2016
- 9781782117650
- £10.99
- 496 pp
- 129×198mm
In a few words
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
Glittering, Sparkian ice
Ali Smith
A wholly original presence in modern literature
Andrew Motion
More about
the book
From the grimly gothic Not to Disturb to the razor-sharp dissection of manners The Takeover and the mordantly brilliant The Only Problem, in a panoramic sweep taking in the shores of the Italian lakes to the castles of Geneva, Muriel Spark casts her unflinching gaze over the continent and onto some of the odder specimens of human nature abounding there.
By turns savage, witty and profound, Spark’s Europe reaffirms Muriel Spark as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.
Enchanting, devastating, genius
Helen Dunmore
There can be few novelists who command such a formidable technique
She shares with Barbara Pym and Iris Murdoch the magical ability to write about people from whom in life we would run a mile, but who are made fascinating by their author's perceptions
Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive
John Updike
New Yorker
Muriel Spark
View profileMuriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet and novelist, she also wrote children’s books, radio plays, the comedy Doctors of Philosophy and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë. Muriel Spark has garnered international praise and many awards, including the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature, the Gold Pen Award, the first Enlightenment Award and the Italia Prize for dramatic radio. She died in 2006.
