(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.<br><br>Spark's most celebrated novel, <i>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</i>, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher's catastrophic effect on her pupils. <i>The Girls of Slender Means </i>is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. <i>The Driver's Seat </i>follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And <i>The Only Problem </i>is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.<br><br>All four novels give evidence of one of the most original and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.