Aiding and Abetting

New York: Doubleday, 2001. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/near fine. TEMPORARILY DISCOUNTED. WAS $30. NOW $20. A Fine copy of the first American Edition, first printing with a push to the spine tail, in a Near Fine dust jacket with some soiling to the rear panel. Her penultimate published novel published only six (6) years prior to her death.

Per Wikipedia: Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1967 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for services to literature. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent.... In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a "Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature"....In 2008, The Times ranked Spark as No. 8 in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945....The central figure in the novel is Hildegarde Wolf, a fraudulent psychiatrist also known as Beate Pappenheim, who practices in Paris.] She finds herself with two patients, both claiming to be Lord Lucan, an English earl who, in a real-life event in London in 1974, mistakenly killed his daughter's nanny, believing her to be his wife.... Building upon this premise, the novel unfolds with a series of humorous coincidences and improbable situations, as the two "Lucans" blackmail Dr. Wolf. The tragic mix-up between the nanny and the wife serves as a mirrored reflection in the intertwined destinies of the two Lucans. In the final chapters set in Africa, there is a reminiscent quality of Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust (1934), who was a model and occasional mentor to Muriel Spark."

An Essentially Fine copy.