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Born in Edinburgh, Muriel Spark was internationally famous and received the Italia Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the FNAC Prix Etranger and the Saltire Prize, among many others. She was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978 and to L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 1988. She died in April 2006.
'This is the story of a dinner party, a knot of people with pasts and connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many ... The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions and ugly motives ... No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and the subversiveness of thought more elegantly' Candia McWilliam, Independent on Sunday 'Stiletto-sharp fiction...as in the bitter confections of Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book' Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday 'Extremely clever and highly entertaining ... A young bride is seen to have been connected, apparently by chance, with a sequence of untimely deaths ... Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle' Penelope Lively 'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times ... She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme' Ian Rankin
'This is the story of a dinner party, a knot of people with pasts and connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many ... The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions and ugly motives ... No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and the subversiveness of thought more elegantly' Candia McWilliam, Independent on Sunday 'Stiletto-sharp fiction...as in the bitter confections of Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book' Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday 'Extremely clever and highly entertaining ... A young bride is seen to have been connected, apparently by chance, with a sequence of untimely deaths ... Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle' Penelope Lively 'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times ... She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme' Ian Rankin
Despite the title, no meeting of minds takes place in Spark's astringent new novel. There is, however, a smart London dinner party at which the threads of her narrative simultaneously come together and unravel. Guests of honor are Hilda's son William and his louche bride Margaret, but Hilda herself, a rich widow with doubts about her new daughter-in-law, is inexplicably absent. When the police finally arrive with grim news, Margaret is aghast--``It shouldn't have been till Sunday!''--and the help are very anxious to leave. Nothing is what it seems in Spark's world, and her treatment is so fast and furious that readers new to her work may not know what hit them. A delight, but mainly for fans. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/90.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Ind.
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