The Finishing School - Softcover

Spark, Muriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400077397 ISBN 13: 9781400077397

Publisher: Anchor, 2005

Synopsis

From Muriel Spark, the grande dame of literary satire, comes this swift, deliciously witty tale of writerly ambition that recalls her beloved The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.College Sunrise is a somewhat louche and vaguely disreputable finishing school located, for now, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into Rowland’s creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a red-haired literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots, has already excited the interest of publishers. The inevitable result: keen envy, and a game of cat and mouse fraught with jealousy and attraction, both literary and sexual.

About this title

Book Description

Now available as a stunning Canon

'A work of glittering Sparkian ice, whose thinly frozen surface tempts you to jump up and down jovially above something deeper and darker' ALI SMITH

From the Back Cover

Praise from Great Britain for The Finishing School

"The most sharply original fictional imagination of our time . . . Starting her career as a poet, Spark in many ways remains one--not least in her deftness at finding images in unexpected places."
--Sunday Times

"What a rich seam Spark has quarried here. Moreover, it is cunning how, to the extent her purpose requires, she exploits the reader's own jealousies or envies, in regard to these imagined students, so rich, so beautiful, so unanxious and so dreadfully young."
--The Spectator

"[Spark's] faculties are in a state of crystalline sharpness, delineating a world of detail so fine . . . that there is no need to crack the surface to find what lies beneath. The inner workings are all there, visible and faintly absurd, as though fixed in a translucent sheet of fictional ice."
--Sunday Telegraph

"A delightful book, laced with wry and witty observations, which makes a timely call for a return to a world where the quality of a novelist's prose counts for more than the colour of his hair or the freshness of his face."
--Daily Mail

"Wittily recalls Spark's best-known work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . . . Spark so brilliantly captures extreme states of mind--paranoia, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis--because she organizes her chaotic and centrifugal subject matter through tightly structured plots and luminously precise language."
--Times Literary Supplement

"Another Spark classic . . . An exploration of teenage homosexuality, attempted murder, jealousy, adultery, all dealt with in the most polite and darkly comic way."
--The Tattler

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400077397
• ISBN 13: 9781400077397
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 181