Not to Disturb

A Novel

10 June 2010

Territory Rights — Worldwide excluding Canada and the British Commonwealth.

Muriel Spark (Author)

Description

Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb.

A winter’s night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. They lock themselves in the library with specific instructions not to be disturbed for any reason. Soon, shouts and screams emerge from the library; the Baron’s lunatic brother starts madly howling in the attic; two of the secretary’s friends are left waiting in a car; a reverend’s services are needed for an impromptu wedding—and despite all that the servants obey their orders as they pass the time playing records, preparing dinner, and documenting false testimonies while a twisted murder plot unfolds upstairs.

Reviews

"Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit: hook her to a pen and the juice purls out of her." — Stephen Schiff, The New Yorker

"Her books enact a modern anxiety about the viability of fiction while being full of old-fashioned novelistic consolations and satisfactions." — James Wood, The Guardian

"A very rare bird…Spark explored [her] metafictional-theological theme further in the brilliant and audacious novellas The Driver’s Seat and Not to Disturb, which I especially admire." — David Lodge, author of Changing Places

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Paperback

9780811218672

132 x 203 mm • 96 pages

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9780811219778

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