Prime of miss jean brodie (Penguin Books)

This is beautifully packaged reissue of Muriel Spark's best loved novel, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". 'You girls are my vocation...I am dedicated to you in my prime'. Miss Jean Brodie is a schoolmistress with a difference.

She is proud, cultured and romantic but her educational ideas are highly progressive and even deeply shocking. So when she decides to transform a group of 'special girls' into the creme de la creme at Marcia Blaine School they are soon known, perhaps suspiciously, as the Brodie set.

Introduced to an unsettling world of adult games and curious intrigues, the Brodie Set know that they are honoured and privileged. Yet there is a price to pay - they must give Miss Brodie their undivided loyalty..."The most gifted and innovative British novelist of her generation".

(David Lodge, "The New York Times"). "Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards". (John Updike, "New Yorker"). "One of the greatest books about growing up".

(James Wood, "Guardian"). Muriel Spark was born and educated in Edinburgh.She was active in the field of creative writing since 1950, when she won a short-story writing competition in the "Observer", and her many subsequent novels include "Memento Mori" (1959), "The Ballad of Peckham Rye" (1960), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1961), "The Girls of Slender Means" (1963) and "Aiding and Abetting" (2000).

She also wrote plays, poems, children's books and biographies. She became Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1993, and died in 2006.