Not to Disturb: A Novel

by Muriel Spark

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219778
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/29/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	420 KB

About the Author

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was the author of dozens of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Driver’s Seat, and many more. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher