The Finishing School (Canons) - Softcover

Spark, Muriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782117571 ISBN 13: 9781782117575

Publisher: Canongate Canons, 2016

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 begin to 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.

About this title

Review

The elegantly written The Finishing School reminds us again of Muriel Spark's unique talent, combining a wry sympathy for human behaviour with a clear-eyed assessment of our foibles. All her books, from the The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to the lesser known volumes, possess an insinuating charm and an understated but often lethal satirical thrust; few middle-class absurdities have gone unanalysed.

The Finishing School is concise but it has all the insinuating charm of her best work. Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina run a mixed-sex finishing school called College Sunrise. Rowland has aspirations as a novelist but he has an unconscious rival--a talented pupil, Chris--whose literary efforts effortlessly outpace Rowland's. Soon a poisonous atmosphere suffuses the school as Rowland falls prey to agonies of jealousy. Spark has always been good at the tensions and rivalries of the school environment, and her touch is as sure as ever in this highly diverting piece. --Barry Forshaw

Review

"An 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) --Evening Standard

"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) --New Yorker

"She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius" (A N WILSON Spectator) --Spectator

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1782117571
• ISBN 13: 9781782117575
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128