This novel was author Muriel Spark’s favorite of her own works. It is short — a mere 107 pages — but suspenseful, dark and twisted. The NYT called it a “spiny and treacherous masterpiece.” What makes it all the more horrifying is that the reader knows from the beginning what is going to happen. Lise, the young woman going on holiday, is going to be murdered. We know how it happens but we don’t know who does it or exactly how Lise gets herself into […]
The Lives of the Brodie Set
I went on vacation last weekend, and I needed a palate cleanser. If you’ve never read Muriel Spark, she’s just the refreshing sort of writer that I needed to really enjoy. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is about an unorthodox teacher of young women in Scotland. She mentors a select group of teen girls, called the Brodie set, and treats them more like equals than children. She tells of her love affair thwarted by her fiance’s death in World War I, secretly pines for […]