Spark's satire

Anarchic, irreverent and razor-sharp, this new collection of Muriel Spark's satires confirms its creator as the mistress of British wit.

From a fraudulent psychiatrist grappling with two equally fraudulent clients in "Aiding and Abetting," to the dirty dealings of "The Abbess of Crewe's" band of corrupt nuns, to the three plane crash survivors of "Robinson" eking out an existence on an Atlantic island after its resident mystic disappears, these three satires probe the recesses of human fallibility with formidable precision. Spanning five decades, the glittering, sharp and sinister works of Spark's satire confirm their author as one of our most incisive and wickedly funny satirists.

Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet and novelist, 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 Brontë. 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.