Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is: Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read.  These can be super popular books you’re surprised you haven’t read yet, books that have been on your to-read list forever, review copies you’ve been sitting on for a decade, books you were so excited to get your hands on and haven’t read yet, etc

These books are just the tip of an iceberg. They are books I’ve had for many years and for one reason or another I’ve left on the shelves. They are the books that came to my mind this week – next week I could list another ten books and the next week and the next week …

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H Lawrence

 Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Hodder & Stoughton| 9 April 2026| 309 pages e-book| Review copy 4*

Description:

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels—with their plots featuring a cast of elderly characters 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 offers a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century.

From Spark’s childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany—via South Africa, London, New York, and Rome—James Bailey traces a light-footed journey around the world and through the novelist’s strange and magnificent books. The result is an irresistible story of transformation, wit, and fierce determination—and a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey appealed to me partly because I’ve read a couple of books by Muriel Spark and last year I read Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor, a warm, personal and affectionate account. Taylor first met Muriel Spark in 1990, when he interviewed her for a newspaper article on the publication of her novel, Symposium. They became friends and met frequently during the last fifteen years of her life. It’s a fascinating insight into her life, and what she thought about writing, as well as reflecting on her books. So, I thought this book would help me learn more about her life and work.

It seems a comprehensive account of Spark’s life and works, drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with and essays by her, profiles in newspapers and magazines,radio and television programmes, literary criticism, reviews as well as letters, manuscripts, receipts and research folders contained in her own archive. He also used Michael Stannards’s Muriel Spark: the Biography. At the end of the book there are notes on each chapter, giving where he found the information and also an extensive bibliography.

Bailey describes Spark thus:

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (née Camberg) is perhaps modern literature’s finest shapeshifter, who over the course of her eighty-eight years and in the twenty years since her death, remains elusive, contradictory and endlessly fascinating. … 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 control freak, and a terrible gossip. She would politely encourage you not to believe what you read in the papers.

What came over to me is an impression that Muriel Spark, like most of us I suppose, changed over the years. She was a complex person who took brave choices in her life, but writing was her main motivation, or even her obsession. Bailey’s book is balanced between giving insights into her personal life, and into her work, showing how the two were intricately intertwined. He writes about her childhood and family life, her relationships with parents, her husband, Sidney and her son, Robin who became estranged from her after his parents divorced. He paints an objective picture of Muriel Spark which doesn’t flatter her. It seems she was rather formidable and a difficult person to get to know.

He also writes about her books, giving a synopsis of each book, stating that they resist easy definition and that her novels and short stories are different in style and genre. Some are social satire, whilst others are detective fiction, ghost stories, political parody, gothic melodrama and the roman clef. As I’ve only read two of her novels I’m now keen to read more and I’ll also seek out her short stories.

Spark’s friend Penny Jardine first met Muriel Spark in 1968 in Rome at a hairdresser’s salon. She was looking for secretarial work and handed Spark her a card bearing her credentials. Six months later she was employed to sort Spark’s library. Some years later, having become friends Jardine moved in with Spark, living in Oliveto, near Arezzo in Tuscany, where she also took care of the household as well as acting as her secretary, liaising with agents and translators, responding to requests for interviews and public appearances, and replying to fan mail on Spark’s behalf. The arrangement got people talking but Spark said that they were not lesbians although they were very fond of each other.

I wondered where the title, Like a Cat Loves a Bird came from. Bailey states that ‘cats wandered in and out of Spark’s life’. Spark was like her feline companions – ‘she came and went as she pleased. Forever on the prowl for her own kind of ‘mousing prospects’, she searched intently for freedom, intellectual stimulation, and the perfect conditions under which her writing could flourish’. The title comes from an interview in which she replied to a question about ‘the cruelty and violence she inflicted on her characters and did she hate them?’ She said ‘Oh no I love them most intensely like a cat loves a bird. You know cats do love birds; they love to fondle them’.

If you enjoy Muriel Spark’s books, I hope you’ll enjoy this book too. It’s not just a biography, but also a literary biography.

Many thanks to the author and Penguin for a review copy via NetGalley.

The 20 Books of Summer challenge is back again this year hosted by Annabelle at AnnaBookBel.

• The challenge runs from Monday June 1st to Monday August 31st
• The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15 or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR. (If you think you’ll only manage 5, that’s fine too.)
• Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick just at whim from your TBR.
• If you do pick a list, you can change it at any time – swap books in/out.
• Don’t get panicked at not reaching your target, it’s not really a challenge as such.
• Just enjoy a summer of great reading and make a bit of space on your shelves!
• Don’t forget to add your posts to the monthly linkys. The final one will stay open till for a week into September to catch the last reviews.

I’ve taken part most years but usually never manage to read all the books I’ve listed, so this year I’m not listing any in advance, apart from the four books on my NetGalley shelf, all due to be published between now and the end of July.

• The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett, because I enjoyed her book The Help.
• Love Lane by Patrick Gale, because I enjoyed his book A Perfectly Good Man.
• The Recruit by L D Sharpe, because I like spy thrillers.
• This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint, because I enjoy Greek Mythology.

Apart from that they’ll all be books I pick as the fancy takes me from my TBRs in my ‘real’ bookcases and on my Kindle. The photo below shows some of my shelves.

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

Jana hasn’t added anything to her blog since January and as she was expecting a baby I’m thinking she’s been busy since then! So, for May I’m featuring books I’ve read in the past two years to spell the word May using the first letters of the book titles. The first two are nonfiction and the last one is a Maigret murder mystery.

M is for Maiden Voyages by Sian Evans

This book covers a wide range of topics that fascinate me – not just travel, but also social history, both World Wars, the sinking of the Titanic, emigration, the impact that the ocean liners had on the economy. and on women’s working lives and independence, adventure and so much more besides.

It is a ‘collection of selected biographical tales, both cautionary and life-affirming, about dynamic women on the move, set primarily between the two World Wars, during the golden age of transatlantic travel.‘ (page 25)

A is for Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark by Alan Taylor

In July 1990 Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark and her friend Penelope (Penny) Jardine. Their meeting led to a friendship and since then they met frequently during the last fifteen years of her life. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists. 

Y is for The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

This begins with the shooting of Monsieur Mostaguen, a local wine merchant, followed by the appearance of the yellow dog, a big, snarling yellow animal, and then an attempt at poisoning for Inspector Maigret to investigate. No one knows who the owner of the yellow dog is. The locals had never seen it before and they all viewed it with fear and suspicion. Maigret keeps his thoughts to himself until the end of the book, when like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he explains it all.

Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge.

A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the ones next to them in the chain.

This month we are starting with Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy. It was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026. As it’s a book I’ve not read this is the description from Goodreads:

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain.

Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love.

I think I may like to read this book.

My first link is Wild Mary by Patrick Marnham, a biography of Mary Wesley, the author of The Camomile Lawn (I remember watching the TV adaptation) and other books. It’s based on her personal papers, and conversations between Mary and Patrick Marnham in 2002. One of the most fascinating things about Mary’s life for me was her wartime experiences, working for MI5 in the decoding unit. 

My second link is another biography Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster, a candid account of her relationships, eg her troubled married life; wartime love affair; and friendships with Gertrude Lawrence and Ellen Doubleday, as well as an excellent source of information on Du Maurier’s method of writing and views on life. 

My third link is The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, a novel about the end of the affair between Maurice Bendrix and his friend’s wife, Sarah. Their affair had begun in 1944 during the London Blitz. It’s a study of love and hate, of desire, of jealousy, of pain, of faithfulness, and of the interaction between God and people.

The fourth book in my chain is The Death of Shame by Ambrose Parry and another character called Sarah. It’s the 5th and final Raven and Fisher book, set in Edinburgh in 1854 . It’s a combination of historical fact and fiction, a tale of murder and medical matters, with the social scene, historical and medical facts slotting perfectly into an intricate murder mystery.

My fifth link is another book on the history of medicine. It’s the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, a biography of Henrietta’s life and death. She died of cervical cancer in 1951. Her cancer cells became known as HeLa cells and have formed the basis for much medical research and drug development ever since. It is also a history of the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and considers the ethical issues around ownership of her cells and the distress, anger and confusion this caused her family.

My final link is linked by the title – Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith by Valerie Grove. Dodie wrote  I Capture the Castle and The Hundred and One Dalmatians amongst many other books and plays. She was born in 1896 and died in 1990. During her lifetime the world went through enormous changes and numerous wars. This biography not only relates Dodie’s life, but is also a record of those years, containing so much about the changing society, culture, values and recalling an unknown (to me at any rate) theatrical age.

The links in my chain are words in the titles, biographies, books about love affairs, characters called Sarah, and books about the history of medicine. Four of the books are biographies and only one is crime fiction.

Next month (June 2, 2026) we’ll start with book by Austrian author Stefan Zweig – The Post Office Girl. Kate has chosen this book in honour of Eurovision being held in Vienna.