A wryly, perceptively funny novel which nevertheless has its sudden darkly suggestive turns. By turns it is a story of pursuit, marital problems, tourist-watching, young love, old love (and an astonishing mixture of the two), and social-political intrigue veiled in recent history, yet involving a bloody murder and a hidden body. Territorial Rights might therefore be labeled a suspense novel, but it is not; it is too cheeky and cheerful for that. Rather, it is a novel about jaded, eccentric people who themselves believe in the possibility of a novel of suspense. Spark’s characters play their quirky roles within a book which is, itself, laughing at them. Reading the novel, one senses Spark’s muted laughter and bemused affection behind one’s own startled and delighted gasps of recognition at the human foibles she so unerringly makes natural and almost cinematically graphic.