From the grimly gothic Not to Disturb to the razor-sharp dissection of manners The Takeover and the mordantly brilliant The Only Problem, in a panoramic sweep taking in the shores of the Italian lakes to the castles of Geneva, Muriel Spark casts her unflinching gaze over the continent and onto some of the odder specimens of human nature abounding there.

By turns savage, witty and profound, Spark's Europe reaffirms Muriel Spark as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century.

"There can be few novelists who command such a formidable technique" - * Financial Times *

"She shares with Barbara Pym and Iris Murdoch the magical ability to write about people from whom in life we would run a mile, but who are made fascinating by their author's perceptions" - * Spectator *

"Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive" - * New Yorker *

"The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso" - * Daily Telegraph *

"A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas" - * New York Times Book Review *

"She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius" - * Spectator *

"Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit" - * New Yorker *