'One of her funniest novels . . . Spark at her sharpest, her purest and her most merciful' ALI SMITH

In The Finishing School Muriel Spark is once again at her biting, satirical best. On the edge of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, a struggling would-be novelist and his wife run a finishing school of questionable reputation to keep the funds flowing. When a seventeen-year-old student's writing career begins to show great promise, tensions run high.

A keen portrait of devouring regret, psychological unravelling and the glittering promise of youth, The Finishing School is the perfect natural partner to Muriel Spark's most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

"An eloquent, subtle, poetic exploration of what words are and what they do to us. Enchanting, devastating, genius" - * The Times *

"Has one of the funniest opening pages Spark has ever written and it's full of her incomparable humour" - * Evening Standard *

"Delightful, laced with wry and witty observations. A rich satire" - * Daily Mail *

"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 *

"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 *

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