Symposium is a novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark, published in 1990. John Mortimer, writing in The Sunday Times, regarded it as one of the best novels of that year.
It is the story of a dinner party and the events leading up to it involving the lives of the five couples attending:
Hurley Reed (an American painter) and Chris Donovan (a rich Australian widow), the party hosts
Lord and Lady Suzy, who have recently been burgled
Ernst and Ella Untzinger, an EU commissioner and his wife, a teacher
Margaret and William Damien, newlyweds just returned from a honeymoon in Venice
Annabel Treece and Roland Sykes, a TV producer and genealogist, cousins
The story includes many flashbacks into the lives of the guests including a convent of Marxist nuns, a burglary ring preying on the guests, a mad Scottish uncle and several unexplained deaths. The dinner party itself ends with the murder of the mother of one of the guests.
Dame Muriel Sarah Spark (née Camberg; 1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist.
Her first novel, The Comforters, was published to great critical acclaim in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) was even more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, making extensive use of flashforwards and imagined conversations. It is clear that James Gillespie's High School was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel. Her residence at the Helena Club was the inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means published in 1963.