LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025

'Absolutely mesmerising' SPECTATOR

'Unputdownable' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Brilliant' WILLIAM BOYD

From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark.

Muriel Spark was a puzzle, and so too were her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson aims to finally crack her code.

We return to Spark's early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.

'A revolutionary book . . . Leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust . . . Deceptively supple, astonishingly rigorous . . . I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark' Lisa Hilton, SPECTATOR

'In Wilson, Spark has met her true match' ANNE ENRIGHT

'Whip-smart . . . I raced through it' Ali Smith, GUARDIAN

'Wilson's books are intense, eclectic and wildly diversionary, her intelligence rising from their pages like steam' Rachel Cooke, OBSERVER

*A 2025 HIGHLIGHT FOR: Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer and Scotsman*