If you've never read her, do!

Muriel Spark, whose spare and humorous novels made her one of the most admired British writers of the postwar years, died in Tuscany on Saturday. She was 88.

Spark wrote more than 20 novels, including "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," which was later adapted for a Broadway hit and a movie.

Gail Wylie, chairman of the Muriel Spark Society, said Spark was "avant-garde in her time."
"She took the conventions of English narrative and turned them upside down," Wylie said.

"The Girls of Slender Means," considered by many to be her best novel, drew on her own experience as a young woman struggling to make ends meet while writing in London. "I was literally starving," she once said. "It was awful. I had nothing to eat."

Novelist Graham Greene gave her a monthly allowance and some wine when she was poverty-stricken, on condition that she would neither thank him nor pray for him.