Not to Disturb
A Novel
10 June 2010
Territory Rights — Worldwide excluding Canada and the British Commonwealth.
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
Also By: Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark
E Book, 2024
A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
Muriel Spark
Paperback, 2024
A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
Muriel Spark
Paperback, 2024
Where does art start or reality end?
Muriel Spark
Paperback, 2021
Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age
Muriel Spark
Paperback, 2018
Wheels spin within wheels in Spark’s comedy of betrayals and terrorism, set in her beloved Venice