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. '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 'What makes her comedy serious is the sense of darker forces lurking beneath the amusing contradictions and bafflements of everyday life . . . unsettling and exhilarating.' William Boyd, Telegraph 'Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards.' John Updike, New Yorker