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Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781844085521

Price: £9.99

ON SALE: 4th February 2010

Genre: Fiction & Related Items / Classic Fiction (pre C 1945)

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Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark. In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, “Remember you must die.” Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

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Reviews

I am reading a trio of novels by Muriel Spark, a marvelously witty English writer, one of the few lady writers I like to read. Her best, I think, is Memento Mori, which is chillingly brilliant
Tennessee Williams
I am reading a trio of novels by Muriel Spark, a marvellously witty English writer . . . Her best, I think, is Memento Mori, which is chillingly brilliant
Tennessee Williams
Spark is a writer who can take the meditative and make it mercurially funny, playful and mischievious
Ali Smith
This funny and macabre book has delighted me as much as any novel that I have read since the war
Graham Greene
The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme
Ian Rankin
There is a Waugh-like brilliance to this novel, in the easy economical narrative, the continuous invention producing a series of surprises, the well-cut dialogue, the controlled tone . . . the most remarkable of Miss Spark's achievements. Nothing is forced, least of all the humour
V. S. Naipaul
There is a Waugh-like brilliance to this novel, in the easy economical narrative, the continuous invention producing a series of surprises, the well-cut dialogue, the controlled tone. This last is the most remarkable of Miss Spark's achievements. Nothing is forced, least of all the humour
V. S. Naipaul, NEW STATESMAN
A brilliant and singularly gruesome achchievement
Evelyn Waugh