Appointment in Arezzo : A friendship with Muriel Spark

Author: Alan Taylor

Biography: literary

Published on 4 October 2018 by Birlinn General (Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 224 pages
131 x 195 x 13mm | 182g

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark’s life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things.

With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel’s birth in 2018.