Muriel Spark

When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf's Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he's Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children's nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. As Dr Wolf sets about deciding which of her patients, if either, is the real Lucan, she finds herself in a fierce battle of wills and an exciting chase across Europe. For someone is deceiving someone, and it may be the good doctor, who, despite her unorthodox therapeutic method (she talks mainly about her own life), has a sinister past, too.

The narrator is one Mrs. Hawkins. She writes from Italy, a far cry from Kensington indeed, taking us back to her threadbare years in postwar London. In both locations our heroine soon uncovered difficulties: shady literary dealings; anonymous letters, blackmail, and even suicide.

Dame Lettie Colston, 79 and pioneer penal reformer, has much in common with the elderly residents of the Maud Long Medical Ward. All are united by scorn, resentment, boredom - and the humour that masks the awareness of impending death. Then the insidious telephone calls begin...

In settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark coolly probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability, displaying the acerbic wit and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her unique talent.

Miss Jean Brodie is proud and cultured with progressive, sometimes shocking ideas and aspirations for the girls in her charge. In exchange for their undivided loyalty the girls earn a special place of honour and privilege within the school. But as boundaries are crossed so the difficulties start to unfold.

In a chic Islington house, ten people sit around a dinner table. The talk is of a robbery, a honeymoon, marriage. The novel begins and ends at this dinner party, and encompasses riotous scenes in a nunnery near St. Pancras, violence in Hampstead, and criminal conspiracy over the champagne glasses in a wedding marquee.