What Do I Read Next?
In the novel The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Spark appears to satirize the Watergate scandal, setting the story in an abbey instead of the White House and featuring Abbess Alexander as a stand-in for former President Richard Nixon.
In The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Spark depicts the lives of impoverished young women residing in a boarding house during the summer of 1945, highlighting their interactions with a jaded poet.
Symposium (1990) by Spark narrates the events of a dinner party where the butler hands over the guest list to thieves who subsequently rob the guests' homes while they are away. Flashbacks during the dinner reveal details about the guests' backgrounds.
Award-winning twentieth-century playwright Lillian Hellman’s longest-running play, The Children’s Hour (1934), centers on two women who manage a private boarding school. A rebellious student from a wealthy, respected family starts a damaging rumor about the headmistresses, leading to tragic consequences that alter their lives permanently.
In Rebecca Goldstein’s The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind (1989), forty-six-year-old philosophy professor Eva Mueller becomes infatuated with a twenty-year-old student. This relationship compels Eva to confront her father's involvement with the Third Reich.
Set in the Middle Ages, Sherryl Jordan’s The Raging Quiet (1999) tells the story of Marnie, who befriends Raven, the village outcast believed to be insane but whom Marnie realizes is merely deaf. Through a system of hand gestures, she learns to communicate with him. However, this places her at risk of being ostracized as well. The novel delves into the perils of targeting individuals for being different.
In Theodore Weesner’s Novemberfest (1994), a fifty-two-year-old German professor at a New Hampshire college faces a professional and personal crisis that forces him to revisit a romantic relationship he had while stationed in Germany during the 1950s.
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