THE TOWER

Thea Lenarduzzi

‘Years and years ago, a man told a woman a story about a girl who died in a tower, in a place hundres of miles north from them and more than a century past. From the moment, every few months, the woman would lead the man through the hoops of the story. But so she died in there...? Did someone tell you this or was there a plaque, something written...? They must have had the same conversation a hundred times or more, his words becoming fewer and flightier with each retelling, the weighted silence of brain-racking and hesitation taking over. It was so long ago, he’d say, even in the early days when it wasn’t.’

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.

Fitzcarraldo Editions (publisher’s description)