The Tower - by Thea Lenarduzzi (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

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.

Review Quotes

'Lenarduzzi's touching debut, winner of the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, serves up lyrical meditations on food, family, and belonging.... Lenarduzzi's admiration for her grandmother's resourcefulness and resilience provides an affecting emotional backbone, and the elegant prose delights.... The result is a ruminative take on what it means to put down roots.'

'Dandelions is a book of hauntings, intensely experienced, pierced by occasional terrors, yet irradiated throughout by passionate attachment. Generations of family ghosts wander between Italy and England, their lives summoned from a beloved grandmother's long memories and the author's own wide-roaming, often poetic reflections on botany, history and language. Thea Lenarduzzi has spread out before us a feast of sensuous and sensitive, nuanced and deeply appealing testimony to migration, survival, and complicated identities at a time when such thoughtfulness is rare and desperately needed.'

-- Marina Warner, author of Inventory of a Life Mislaid (praise for Dandelions)

About the Author

Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor. Her debut, Dandelions, a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, won the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for 'literary autobiography of outstanding merit'. The Tower is her second book.