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Electric Spark

By Frances Wilson

Electric Spark

By Frances Wilson

0 - Default Title
Description
Long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction The award-winning biographer Frances Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, a consummate artist of the twentieth century. "Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is," said Muriel Spark. Muriel Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences, and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as "Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes." By following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. It takes us through her early years, when turmoil reigned: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because her experiences in the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically distilled, the material of her art. "As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader" (The Boston Globe), in Electric Spark Frances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.
Product details
Number of Pages:
432
Release Date:
2025-09-23
Publication Date:
2025-09-23
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0374613206
ISBN13:
9780374613204
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
640 g
Height:
159 cm
Width:
234 cm
Thickness:
36 cm
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