Open to the Public

A new collection by the master story-teller. These stories are eerie and sometimes a little perverse, always delightful, and as rich as her acclaimed novels. Open to the Public contains thirty-seven marvelous stories, ten of which have never before been published in the US. These stories offer a bouquet of unexpected protagonists-faded aristocrats and ghosts, cleaning women and blithe murderers, sinister children and a lecherous hanging judge, and even a dragon. The settings of Open to the Public swing from England to contemporary Italy, postwar Africa, the French countryside, an Austrian village, and then back to the Portobello Road. Spark reorders reality in odd ways; she probes beneath the veneer of social respectability to finger undercurrents of madness-at the beginning of one of her tales, one can never guess its end.