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Beautifully packaged reissue of one of
Muriel Spark's best loved novels, The Girls of
Slender Means
'Long ago in 1945
all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for
exceptions'
In the May of Teck
Club - a London hostel 'three times window shattered
since 1940 but never directly hit' - the young lady
residents do their best to act as if the war never
happened. They practice elocution, and jostle one
another over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. But
behind the girls' giddy literary and amorous
peregrinations they hide some tragically painful secrets
and wounds.'You girls are my vocation . . . I am
dedicated to you in my prime'
'Reading the novel
as a young woman was a random gift; rereading it today
is to encounter the rarest of fiction and to appreciate
the early and enduring genius of Muriel Spark' Carol
Shields, Guardian
'One of Spark's
most evocative novels' Anne Taylor
Muriel Spark was
born and educated in Edinburgh. She was active in the
field of creative writing since 1950, when she won a
short-story writing competition in the Observer, and her
many subsequent novels include Memento Mori
(1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of
Slender Means (1963) and Aiding and Abetting
(2000). She also wrote plays, poems, children's books
and biographies. She became Dame Commander of the
British Empire in 1993, and died in 2006.
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