James Bailey for Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Live of Muriel Spark
Thursday 23rd April 2026
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
6.30pm
7pm
"This is a deeply stylish, astute and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer" - Francesca Wade
There are few names in the history of Scottish literature more influential than Muriel Spark, and there are few writers better positioned to document her life than James Bailey. This astounding biography is witty, mischevious, comprehensive, and incredibly readable. We are so delighted to welcome James to the bookshop this April.
"She was, if you believe what you read in the papers: a genius, a survivor, a bad mother, a fickle friend, a closeted lesbian, a tyrant, a loner, an eccentric, a recluse, a gossip, and an arch-manipulator. She would politely encourage you not to believe what you read in the papers."
Muriel Spark was one of literature's great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels - with their plots featuring pensioners receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray - but it is also true of her as a person.
As sly, nimble and elegant as Spark's own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird is a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century. From her childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany - via South Africa, London, New York and Rome - it traces a light-footed journey around the world and through her strange and magnificent bibliography. It tells an irresistible story of transformation, wit and fierce determination and makes a passionate case for this vital modern artist.
James Bailey is a writer and researcher from Manchester. He is a Doctor of Literature, and the author of Muriel Spark's Early Fiction (2021) and the co-editor of British Women Short Story Writers (2015). His day job involves working to support the development of other writers, as well as publishers, bookshops and literature festivals.