Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel
by Frances Wilson
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Electric Spark
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
The award-winning biographer Frances Wilson presents an exhilarating new look at Muriel Spark, a consummate artist of the twentieth century.
“Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is,” said Muriel Spark.
Muriel 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.
Electric 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.
“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.
The book, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN#9781250448170 in Paperback by Frances Wilson may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 20 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.
Details
- Publisher
- Picador
- Author
- Frances Wilson
- Format
- Paperback
- Published
- Sep 22, 2026
- ISBN-13
- 9781250448170
- ISBN-10
- 1250448174
- Pages
- 432
- Carton quantity
- 20 copies
Electric Spark in bulk: pricing
Volume pricing applies automatically in your cart. No codes, no account needed.
| Copies | Price per copy | You save |
|---|---|---|
| 20 – 99 | $14.40 | 40% off list |
| 100 – 249 | $13.92 | 42% off list |
| 250 – 499 | $12.72 | 47% off list |
| 500 – 999 | $12.24 | 49% off list |
| 1,000+ | $11.76 | 51% off list |
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