LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
‘You either ‘get’ Spark or you don’t. She always was different, and became more so with practice. An appetite for caricatures, for types… The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a comedy – some critics have trouble remembering that – filled with delicious volte-faces, which read to me like flash inspirations as Spark was writing… the author was on cruise control, astonishingly able to wrap everything up and exit in 130-odd sprightly pages… Time in Peckham runs circles. The prose will correspondingly fall into a rhythm; it is incantatory, ritualistic. Sprung like poetry, very close to song, this is the music to which Spark thinks.’ From the introduction by Ronald Frame.
This is one novel in the absolutely glorious, must-have, complete collection of all 22 novels by Muriel Spark. This series is a wonderful way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel Spark’s birth. Edited by Alan Taylor, author of Appointment In Arezzo, A Friendship with Muriel Spark, each perfectly sized and beautiful hardback book is introduced by a leading writer. Each introduction, while individually touching on thoughts and feelings, mentions the originality, the wit and humour, the cleverness of the writing. Whether an existing fan, or new to her works, this collection from one of our greatest writers, beckons, and quite simply, just asks to be read and re-read. ~ Lovereading.co.uk
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The Ballad of Peckham Rye Synopsis
A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to Beauty, the resident femme fatale, and even Mr Druce, the unsuspecting Managing Director himself.
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Press Reviews
Muriel Spark Press Reviews
Often referred to as ‘the writer’s writer’, Spark’s work has garnered acclaim around
the globe:
“[Spark] has written some things that seem likely to go on being read as long as fiction in English is read at all.” – New York Times Book Review
“The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . my admiration for Spark's contribution to literature knows no bounds” – Ian Rankin
“Some of [Spark's] finest fictions are novellas rather than novels, short enough to be read in a single dizzying sitting." – David Lodge
Author
About Muriel Spark
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, a comedy Doctors of Philosophy, (first performed in London in 1962 and published 1963) and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë.
For her long career of literary achievement, which began in 1951, when she won a short-story competition in the Observer, Muriel Spark garnered international praise and many awards, which include 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.
Author photo © P A Archive and Press Association Images
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