Symposium is a novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Early life:...

, published in 1990.

Plot introduction

It is the story of a dinner party and the events leading up to it involving the lives of the five couples attending:

• Hurley Reed (an American painter) and Chris Donovan (a rich Australian widow), the party hosts
• Lord and Lady Suzy, who have recently been burgled
• Ernst and Ella Untzinger, an EU commissioner and his wife, a teacher
• Margaret and William Damien, newlyweds just returned from a honeymoon in Venice
• Annabel Treece and Roland Sykes, a TV producer and genealogist, cousins

The story includes many flashbacks into the lives of the guests including a convent of unconventional nuns, a burglary ring preying on the guests, a mad Scottish uncle and several unexplained deaths. The dinner party itself ends with the murder of the mother of one of the guests...

Reception

• Symposium was applauded by Time Magazine for the "sinister elegance" of Muriel Spark's "medium of light but lethal comedy."
• 'Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw...It is extremely clever and highly entertaining' - Penelope Lively
  Penelope Lively
  Penelope Lively CBE, FRSL is a prolific, popular and critically acclaimed author of fiction for both children and adults. She has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize, winning once for Moon Tiger in 1987.-Personal:...
  
  
• 'Stiletto-sharp fiction...it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book' - Scotland on Sunday
  Scotland on Sunday
  Scotland on Sunday is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by The Scotsman Publications Ltd and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate The Scotsman...
  
  

External links

• review from EW.com
• Spark's Symposium: a postmodernist critique