The Finishing School (Canons)

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 creme de la creme -- 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 * *

Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet and novelist, she is most well known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 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 Bronte. 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.