Since 2011, I’ve had a tradition of reading a book by a single author on Christmas Eve. Initially, that was John Steinbeck; now, it’s Muriel Spark. In 2025, that reading didn’t go as planned due to some mid-December travel and the resulting Viennese Death Cough. Some antibiotics and a trip to Frenchtown Bookshop later, I wasn’t able to find a Spark I hadn’t already read, so I opted for a contemporary of hers about whom I’ve heard good things, Elizabeth Taylor. And a few days after Christmas, my copy of a new-to-me Spark novel arrived in the mail. Quick thoughts on both books follow…

My introduction to Elizabeth Taylor came via this bit of late-December reading: her 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. The novel’s title tells you exactly what you’re getting: it’s about an aging woman (the titular Mrs Palfrey) who moves into a hotel (the titular Claremont) and attempts to sort out her place in the world.

It is often a thoroughly bleak book. Mrs Palfrey’s relationship to her family is chilly, and her grandson appears to have no use for her whatsoever. Instead, she befriends Ludo, a young writer. It’s in their bond that I began to understand why a lot of writer friends are Taylor devotees. There is genuine affection between the two characters, but each also gains something from it: Ludo draws upon their meetings for his fiction, while Mrs Palfrey enlists Ludo as a stand-in for her grandson to gain some social cachet with the other residents of the hotel.

This is a book about people nearing the ends of their lives, and one of the questions Taylor addresses in its pages is how precisely one does that. Several residents of the hotel spend plenty of time arguing about how much better things were in the past; Mrs Palfrey’s search for something other than that makes her an unlikely existential hero, but also a thoroughly compelling one.

As for Muriel Spark, this year’s intended Christmas Eve reading was her 1979 novel Territorial Rights. This novel has a lot of engaging elements: a Venetian setting, the hints of some characters’ connections to fascism, and a subplot involving a private detective agency. The novel begins with two characters set to meet — one younger man, Robert Leaver, and one older man, Robert Curran, who prefers to go by his surname. Robert has an interest in art history; Curran is well-positioned to help Robert achieve his goals. Are we about to witness a nuanced power struggle in the Patricia Highsmith mode?

Not really, because halfway through the novel, one of its main characters abruptly exits the narrative. This isn’t an avant-garde gesture; that disappearance becomes the focal point of the novel. But it isn’t remotely where you’d expect this book to go; what had seemed to be the central relationship and central conflict instead fragments into a number of interconnected clashes. It’s a memorable immersion in its Venetian setting — but it’s also a gripping novel that rarely goes where you might expect, and it’s a stronger book for it.