January Marlow, our unsentimental heroine, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson’s island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as “an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it.” In Robinson, Spark’s supreme second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, and — perhaps — murder. Everything astounds, confounds, and convinces, frighteningly. “She is,” as Charles Alva Hoyt once put it, “the Jane Austen of the Surrealists.” “To read Spark,” as The Georgia Review noted, “is to encounter delight after delight,” and this marvelous novel is another display of the powers of our “most gifted and innovative British novelist” (The New York Times). She has been called “completely, searingly original" (Independent) and “wickedly funny… astonishingly talented… and truly inimitable” (San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle). In the work of Dame Muriel — in the last words of _Robinson — _“immediately all things are possible.”