{"product_id":"electric-spark-the-enigma-of-dame-muriel-by-frances-wilson","title":"Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel by Frances Wilson","description":"\u003cp\u003eLong-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe award-winning biographer Frances Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, a consummate artist of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is,” said Muriel Spark.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMuriel 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.” By following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eElectric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. It takes us through her early years, when turmoil reigned: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because her experiences in the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically distilled, the material of her art.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader” (The Boston Globe), in Electric Spark Frances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Landmark Booksellers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48087560618224,"sku":"9780374613204","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0586\/1385\/8477\/files\/9780374613204.jpg?v=1758654636","url":"https:\/\/shop.landmarkbooksellers.com\/products\/electric-spark-the-enigma-of-dame-muriel-by-frances-wilson","provider":"Landmark Booksellers","version":"1.0","type":"link"}