Electric Spark
The Enigma of Muriel Spark - Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 30 days of Standard free
£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Electric Spark
Narrated by:
Sara Vickers
Buy Now for £15.22
-
Narrated by:
-
Sara Vickers
-
By:
-
Frances Wilson
‘Absolutely mesmerising’ Spectator
‘I raced through it’ Ali Smith, Guardian
‘Unputdownable’ Financial Times
‘A fire-starter’ New York Times
‘Hypnotic’ TLS
‘Joyously, brilliantly intelligent’ Anne Enright
From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR: THE TIMES/SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, LONDON STANDARD AND WASHINGTON POST
Muriel Spark was a puzzle, and so too were her books. She dealt in word games, tricks and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson aims to finally crack her code.
We return to Spark’s early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because her experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.©2025 Frances Wilson (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c
Critic reviews
A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique – something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson’s achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust . . . Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn’t put me down (Lisa Hilton)
Wilson is not any old biographer. Her books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam – and in Spark, the cleverest and the weirdest of them all, she may have found her ultimate subject (Rachel Cooke)
I raced through Frances Wilson’s whip-smart Electric Spark (Ali Smith)
Electric Spark is a darting, innovative example of the form – perhaps more Ouija board than book . . . [Wilson’s] own surveillance is through a magnifying glass and her book is a fire-starter (Alexandra Jacobs)
Excellent . . . focuses on the early years of the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie . . . Skilfully weaves together numerous intriguing strands to flesh out this portrait of a truly enigmatic writer (Martin Chilton)
Biography, then – which Frances Wilson attempts in this beautifully written book – is the closest readers can get to Spark . . . "Sparkian" has not entered common parlance but, by the time you finish this brilliant book, you think it probably should
Wilson combines meticulous scholarship with graceful lyricism in a sympathetic yet unflinching portrait that is as ruthlessly precise as any Sparkian one-liner. Hypnotic, disquieting and gleefully heretical, Electric Spark crackles with the brilliance of both subject and author (Lisa Hilton)
So original and engaging . . . The result of this blend of existing sources and fresh archival finds is an unputdownable and “electric” perspective on the extraordinary talent and life that together forged Spark’s fiction . . . A fabulous achievement, in more than one sense (Isabel Berwick)
A terrific study of Scottish writer Muriel Spark, focusing on the formative decades before the publication of her first novel (Fiona Sturges)
A deeply intelligent, captivating and passionate work that reminds us of everything a literary biography can and should be (Jessica Ferri)
A dynamic and dizzying weave of early struggles and future success (Anthony Cummins)
An entertaining account of some entertainingly appalling people
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A lively and informative biography
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
First, despite being supposedly unabridged there are bits that it entirely omits, such as the example of the cryptography on p.270. Several quotes from letters show underlining and strike-through, with the struck through passages also entirely omitted when they are relevant to the point being made. The photos are also missing and not included in a PDF as quality audio titles usually do.
Second, although the actor here has a suitably nice Scottish voice, she can't pronounce correctly many of the words in this well-written and complex biography. I lost count of the words that placed the stress in the wrong place, were shorn of a syllable as she rushed over them, or were simply mispronounced. In some cases she substitutes a word she does know for the one that is actually written, creating nonsense (the funniest version of this was inventing a College called CORPSES Christi!). I was so frustrated in the end, that I stopped listening to the audio and reverted to just reading the physical book. I'd advise everyone to do the same, without wasting their money on this poorly performed version.
Audio omits things and is badly performed
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.