LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
‘There is a palpable sense as The Girls of Slender Means opens of the curtain rising, catching people in mid-conversation, in half-spoken sentences, and banal acts that, ordinary though they seem, prove to be telling. A slender novel it might be, but every word has heft… This was Spark’s seventh novel, published in November 1963, in the wake of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had come out two years before. It was, thus, the first novel she wrote when she was famous, conditions she had never before worked under… Opening a few days after the VE Day celebrations on 8 May 1945, rising to a crescendo after the General Election of July, in which Churchill was ousted, and fading out with London’s seething VJ Day party on the night of 15 August 1945, it is one of very few immediate post-war novels by a novelist who lived through it… And for all the soul-searching found in this novel, and its terrible glimpses of evil, it is a book that rings with merriment.’ From the introduction by Rosemary Goring
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 Girls of Slender Means Synopsis
Like the May of Teck Club itself-"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"-its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.
Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."
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Press Reviews
Muriel Spark Press Reviews
“[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
"A master of malice and mayhem" Michiko Katutani, New York Times
"Brilliantly original and fascinating" Evelyn Waugh
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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