_'Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back' ~ Katherine Rundell_
_A 2025 HIGHLIGHT FOR:_ _TELEGRAPH, FINANCIAL TIMES,_ _GUARDIAN,_ _OBSERVER_ _AND_ _SCOTSMAN._
From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.
Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist and the author of six works of non-fiction, including _Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey_, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, and _Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence_, which won the Plutarch Award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize.
_Electric Spark_ explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.
_'Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is' Muriel Spark_
The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is 'puzzling'. 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'. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.