Spark’s Satire Aiding and Abetting: The Abbess of Crewe: Robinson
- 4 Aug 2016
- 9781782117674
- £14.99
- 416 pp
- 129×198mm
In a few words
Anarchic, irreverent and razor-sharp, this new collection of Muriel Spark’s satires confirms its creator as the mistress of British wit
Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as smashed glass
John Updike
New YorkerEnchanting, devastating, genius
Helen Dunmore
More about
the book
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.
Peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the crème de la crème
Ian Rankin
A receptive and wholly distinctive genius
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
Muriel Spark
View profileMuriel 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 Brontë. 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.
