We are very excited to say that Thea Lenarduzzi will be coming to Stockport, the day after publication date on 10th October to chat in our shop with Jodie Matthews all about the book. Tickets here.
Once upon a time, there was a tower on a hill, beyond the dark trees, somewhere north. An octagonal tower on two levels: glass upstairs and stone below, beneath a steep slate roof – a folly, it was said. According to locals, a young woman named Annie who fell ill was confined to the tower by her father for three years and died there, alone. Fascinated by Annie’s story, Thea Lenarduzzi attempts to piece the past together in a formidable act of imagination, which, tugging at the strings of the how, why and who of stories, begins to unravel the very idea of storytelling itself. Veering between fiction, memoir, fairy tale and folklore, The Tower is an extraordinary book about power, abuse and why we don’t always tell the story we set out to tell.
‘Thea Lenarduzzi works against the grain of her own and readers’ expectations in this graceful book, in which stories are dismantled so that new truths can be found. Beautifully considered: The Tower is both delicate and wise.’
— Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
‘A hybrid, shifting, searching work that applies pressure to the boundaries between forms before it crosses them, The Tower asks questions about stories, narrative and history – and our uneasy inheritance of them – that linger long after the book’s final pages. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.’
— Helen Charman, author of Mother State
‘Life, and writing, can expand from a detail: to which extent must this detail be personal? In this remarkable and surprising book, Thea Lenarduzzi wanders through the many paths of fiction-making, in a literary quest to find out if the girl in the tower is a romanticized symbol, an exhausted trope, a resourceful broken archive at the beginning of a powerful story, hers as much as ours. Truly fascinating and brimming with intellectual energy.’
— Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know
‘In The Tower, Thea Lenarduzzi offers a brilliant and exacting meditation on the stories we tell about a life – and the cultural and familial forces of thought that can obscure self-understanding. Tracing the fate of a young woman exiled to a stone tower after a tuberculosis diagnosis, Lenarduzzi braids archival enquiry with imaginative force, illuminating how the past shapes our present griefs and inheritances. This is a rare kind of book: intimate yet capacious, unsettling yet precise in its enquiry into harm, inheritance and the limits of language. The result is a profound reckoning with memory and silence: what we remember, what we omit and why.’
— Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
‘The Tower is about the allure (and refusal) of certain narratives, about the sublime quest an author takes when she embarks on the act of storytelling. Its form – a composite of fiction, memoir, history – mirrors its subject matter and, excitingly, “stages” its very questions. In this elegantly composed, layered and expansive book, Thea Lenarduzzi articulates something of the mysterious nature of stories while also making an argument for all that is unknowable.’
— Lauren Aimee Curtis, author of Strangers at the Port
‘With her sensitive, fable-like unravelling of a mysterious anecdote, Thea Lenarduzzi enlists and subverts all the elements of a gripping story – a secret, a journey, doubt and denouement – to emerge with an intricately crafted meditation on the nature of narrative itself. The Tower masterfully loops back on itself and retraces its own steps to uncover the secrets, wishes and fears that lurk in the stories we tell about ourselves, and what draws us to those of others.’
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Published on 9th October. Paperback.
