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.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
A razor-sharp work of psychological fiction, The Driver's Seat chronicles the unsettling final day of Lise, a woman who travels abroad with a chilling and singular sense of purpose — to orchestrate her own violent end. Muriel Spark constructs the narrative with cold, clinical precision, deploying dramatic irony from the very first pages as the reader is told outright that Lise will be murdered, transforming the suspense from *what* will happen into the deeply disturbing question of *how* and *why*. The tone is detached and darkly satirical, presenting Lise's frantic search for the right man not as a thriller but as a grotesque inversion of autonomy and desire. Spark argues, through this spare and unsettling novella, that the compulsion to control one's own fate — even unto death — is a profound and terrifying expression of selfhood in a dehumanizing modern world. Widely regarded as one of the most formally daring works of twentieth-century British fiction, it remains a haunting and unforgettable meditation on agency, identity, and the void.
Author: Muriel Spark
Format: Hardback
Published: 1970, Macmillan
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
A razor-sharp work of psychological fiction, The Driver's Seat chronicles the unsettling final day of Lise, a woman who travels abroad with a chilling and singular sense of purpose — to orchestrate her own violent end. Muriel Spark constructs the narrative with cold, clinical precision, deploying dramatic irony from the very first pages as the reader is told outright that Lise will be murdered, transforming the suspense from *what* will happen into the deeply disturbing question of *how* and *why*. The tone is detached and darkly satirical, presenting Lise's frantic search for the right man not as a thriller but as a grotesque inversion of autonomy and desire. Spark argues, through this spare and unsettling novella, that the compulsion to control one's own fate — even unto death — is a profound and terrifying expression of selfhood in a dehumanizing modern world. Widely regarded as one of the most formally daring works of twentieth-century British fiction, it remains a haunting and unforgettable meditation on agency, identity, and the void.