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Symposium
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Author
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Muriel Spark.
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Publisher
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New Directions
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Format
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paperback
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Product Dimensions
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8
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5.25
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0.5
inches
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ISBN
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9780811216593
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Pages/Publication Date
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192/2006
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Daedalus Item Code
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23914
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This item is not available.
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Description
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Five posh couples gather for a dinner party on an October evening, enjoying "the pheasant (flambé in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the arrival of late-coming guest Hilda Damien who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is busy being murdered at that very moment. Mixed into Muriel Spark's "virtuoso performance" (Time Out) are a Monet, a mad Scottish uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent-a-butler, but the centerpiece of the novel is Margaret, a perfectly evil young murderess (and a classic sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror). Margaret has married Hilda's rich son, having nabbed him at the fruit counter at Harrod's—and she has plans. "Stiletto-sharp fiction…. As in the bitter confections of Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is the dialog that propels this dangerous, devilish book."—Scotland on Sunday "The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives…. No living writer [in 1990] handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly."—Independent on Sunday
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