The quiet life of schoolmaster Bill Mor and his wife Nan is disturbed when a young woman, Rain Carter, arrives at the school to paint the portrait of the headmaster.
Best known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing
Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and p
In a dark comedy of errors, Iris Murdoch portrays the mischief wrought by Julius, a cynical intellectual who decides to demonstrate through a Machiavellian experiment how easily loving couples, caring friends, and devoted siblings can betray their loyalti
When Marian Taylor takes a post as governess at Gaze Castle, a remote house on a desolate coast, she finds herself confronted with a number of weird mysteries and involved in a drama she only partly understands.
Bruno is nearly ninety. Obsessed with his past and a passion for spiders, he is the centre of a complex web of relationships involving his estranged son Miles; Danby, his hapless son-in-law; Danby's mistress, Adelaide; and her twin cousins, the vengeful W
As macabre as a Jacobean tragedy, as frivolous as a Restoration comedy, Iris Murdoch's fifth novel takes sombre themes - adultery, incest, castration, violence and suicide - and yet succeeds in making of them a book that is brilliantly enjoyable.
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidabl
A scintillating novel of fate, accidents, and moral dilemmasSet in the time of the Vietnam War, this story concerns the plight of a young American, happily installed in a perfect job in England, engaged to a wonderful girl, who is suddenly drafted to a wa