Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark's timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II   "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!" So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold-and she doesn't stop with just their intellectual...

Touched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa’s relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of war In 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul...

In four short works of contemporary fiction that probe metaphysical truths, a charismatic teacher has a devastating impact on her students, young women struggle for survival in a post-war London hostel, a woman searches for her own death, and a man is implicated in his wife's terrorist activities.