Symposium - Hardcover

This is the story of a dinner party, a knot of people with pasts and connections which at first seem few but are later found to be many ... The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonist s' world rests is being thinned from beneath by boiling emotions and ugly motives ... No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and the subversiveness of thought more elegantly (Candia McWilliam, Independent on Sunday)

Stiletto-sharp fiction...as in the bitter confections of Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book (Alan Taylor, Scotland on Sunday)

Extremely clever and highly entertaining ... A young bride is seen to have been connected, apparently by chance, with a sequence of untimely deaths ... Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle (Penelope Lively)

The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times . . . She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the crème de la crème (Ian Rankin)

Seemingly banal dinner-party chat reveals strange tales of the guests' dodgy pasts and unreliable futures. Symposium is Muriel Spark at her wicked best.