Description
Book Synopsis'One of her funniest novels . . . Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful' ALI SMITH
In The Finishing School Muriel Spark is once again at her biting, satirical best. On the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, a struggling would-be novelist and his wife run a finishing school of questionable reputation to keep the funds flowing. When a seventeen-year-old student's writing career begins to show great promise, tensions run high.
A keen portrait of devouring regret, psychological unravelling and the glittering promise of youth, The Finishing School is the perfect natural partner to Muriel Spark's most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Trade ReviewAn
eloquent,
subtle,
poetic exploration of what words are and what they do to us.
Enchanting,
devastating,
genius -- Helen Dunmore * * The Times * *
Has one of the funniest opening pages Spark has ever written and it's full of her incomparable humour * * Evening Standard * *
Delightful, laced with
wry and witty observations.
A rich satire * * Daily Mail * *
My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the crème de la crème -- IAN RANKIN
This is a work, as usual, of
glittering Sparkian ice, whose thinly frozen surface tempts you to jump up and down jovially above something deeper and darker . . . One wonders at the
simplicity and the intricacy of the plot,
blowaway as gossamer . . . One
marvels too at the
under-surface play of spiritual light and dark . . . One of her funniest novels . . .
Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful -- Ali Smith
Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive -- JOHN UPDIKE * * New Yorker * *
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 wholly original presence in modern literature -- ANDREW MOTION
A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas * * New York Times Book Review * *
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 * *
She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius -- A N WILSON * * Spectator * *
