Spark's Satire: Aiding and Abetting: The Abbess of Crewe: Robinson

Description

From a fraudulent psychiatrist grappling with two equally fraudulent clients in Aiding and Abetting, to the dirty dealings of The Abbess of Crewe's band of corrupt nuns, to the three plane crash survivors of Robinson eking out an existence on an Atlantic island after its resident mystic disappears, these three satires probe the recesses of human fallibility with formidable precision. Spanning five decades, the glittering, sharp and sinister works of Spark's Satire confirm their author as one of our most incisive and wickedly funny satirists.

Muriel 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 Bront.. 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.

Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as smashed glass -- JOHN UPDIKE * * New Yorker * * Enchanting, devastating, genius -- HELEN DUNMORE Peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme -- IAN RANKIN A receptive and wholly distinctive genius * * Spectator * * A wholly original presence in modern literature -- ANDREW MOTION The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso * * Daily Telegraph * * A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas * * New York Times Book Review * * She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius -- A N WILSON * * Spectator * * Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit * * New Yorker * * There can be few novelists who command such a formidable technique * * Financial Times * * Brilliant, Sparkian ice -- ALI SMITH