The Driver's Seat
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
In a novel of suffocating tension and psychological dread, Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat chronicles a single, catastrophic day in the life of Lise, a woman who travels to an unnamed European city with a singular, terrifying purpose — to find the man who will kill her. Published in 1970, this unsettling novella presents a protagonist wholly in command of her own destruction, selecting her outfit, her victim, and the choreography of her fate with chilling, methodical precision. Spark strips away suspense in the traditional sense, revealing Lise's end from the very opening pages, and yet the compulsion to read on is absolute and breathless. What distinguishes this work as a landmark of post-war British fiction is Spark's razor-sharp, icily detached prose style — a narrative voice that observes Lise's unraveling with the cool distance of a coroner rather than the warmth of a confidant. The Driver's Seat argues, with devastating economy, that autonomy can be a form of madness, and that the will to self-determination can curdle into something monstrous. Themes of existential control, female agency, and the violence lurking beneath bourgeois modernity are rendered in crystalline, unflinching sentences that cut to the bone. For readers who believe they have encountered the limits of the psychological thriller, Spark's masterwork insists otherwise.
Author: Muriel Spark
Format: Hardback
Published: 1970, Macmillan
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
In a novel of suffocating tension and psychological dread, Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat chronicles a single, catastrophic day in the life of Lise, a woman who travels to an unnamed European city with a singular, terrifying purpose — to find the man who will kill her. Published in 1970, this unsettling novella presents a protagonist wholly in command of her own destruction, selecting her outfit, her victim, and the choreography of her fate with chilling, methodical precision. Spark strips away suspense in the traditional sense, revealing Lise's end from the very opening pages, and yet the compulsion to read on is absolute and breathless. What distinguishes this work as a landmark of post-war British fiction is Spark's razor-sharp, icily detached prose style — a narrative voice that observes Lise's unraveling with the cool distance of a coroner rather than the warmth of a confidant. The Driver's Seat argues, with devastating economy, that autonomy can be a form of madness, and that the will to self-determination can curdle into something monstrous. Themes of existential control, female agency, and the violence lurking beneath bourgeois modernity are rendered in crystalline, unflinching sentences that cut to the bone. For readers who believe they have encountered the limits of the psychological thriller, Spark's masterwork insists otherwise.