Description
"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II.
Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds.
Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."
Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."
Reviews
"Spark writes with a light comic touch, but there's an undertone of a kind of existential desperation." — Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune
Also By: Muriel Spark 
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
E Book, 2024
A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Paperback, 2024
A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
Loitering with Intent
Paperback, 2024
Where does art start or reality end?
Memento Mori
Paperback, 2021
Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age
Territorial Rights
Paperback, 2018
Wheels spin within wheels in Spark’s comedy of betrayals and terrorism, set in her beloved Venice
