Jacket Notes: Venice, with its fading palazzos, its promise of sexual intrigue, and its countless hiding places for secrets best kept hidden, is the setting for Muriel Spark's glittering new novel.

Robert arrives off-season at the Pensione Sofia to escape a complicated affair and simplify his life. But in Venice nothing is what it seem--even the innocent pensione has a body buried in the garden--and Robert is soon ensnared in a plot as intricate and ingenious as any Muriel Spark has devised. Drawn together unexpectedly by blackmail and an almost forgotten crime, a glorious rogues' gallery of characters scurry to protect themselves. But who is safe away from home, without territorial rights? In the Venice of Muriel Spark, appearances are not only deceiving, but as fragile as houses built on water.
Territorial Rights is a novel about the complications that follow deception, but for Muriel Spark such matters are also the stuff of high comedy and sharp observations on the precarious way we live now. She proves once again that what might be melodrama or operatic buffoonery is stark realism in Italy, and that when "we all have something to hide," the results can be wickedly funny. Shrewd, witty, always alert to the nuances of human behavior, this is Muriel Spark at her incomparable best.
(© Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc.)