Short and riveting enough to read in a day, The Driver's Seat is steeped in the weirdness of summer in a 1970s Meditteranean town, complete with Manson-like hippie figures leaving trails of macrobioic rice, paranoid women lost in malls, the constant expectation that something terrible is about to happen.
— Madeleine
A crime novel unlike any I've ever read - as David Lodge very aptly put it, "a crime novel turned inside out." Lise, a capricious and impenetrable character from page 1, is clearly planning something fishy for her vacation to an unnamed southern city, but what?! The narration is close third person but never gets inside Lise's head, so the reader watches, baffled, as she pinballs around, making up fantastic lies to anyone who will listen, doing incomprehensible things at every turn. And to what end? I'll never again be able to hear someone described as "my type" without getting chills.
— Nick FThe Driver’s Seat, Spark’s own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as “her spiny and treacherous masterpiece.”