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  • Published: 8 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141191362
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

The Spider's House




Paul Bowles's masterpiece explores the dangerous space between cultures, through the attempt of one young man to find his place in a fragmenting society

Fez, 1954, and American ex-pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night-time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another outsider to the newly politicised life of Morocco, in this brutally honest novel of life in the midst of terrorism, violence and the ugly opportunism that accompanies both.

Bowles's most masterly novel combines his classic themes: the conflict of Eastern and Western cultures and the trials of otherness.

  • Published: 8 January 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141191362
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, New York, in 1910. He began composing music and writing stories at a very early age, and at sixteen some of his poetry was published in the French literary magazine transition. At the age of eighteen he began his travels to Europe, North Africa, Mexico and Central America. A student of Aaron Copland, Bowles established his reputation early as a gifted composer. In 1945 he returned to writing short stories and by 1947, when he went to live in Tangier, fiction had become his major focus. He wrote four novels, The Sheltering Sky, Let it Come Down, The Spider's House and Up Above the World; one hundred short stories; a book of poetry; and many travel essays. He lived in Tangier until his death in November 1999.

In his obituary The Times described Bowles as 'one of the most unusual, unconventional and gifted men of his time', and the Independent wrote: 'Bowles was a mystic, a man of many abilities . . . he will be seen as a major twentieth-century writer'.

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