The Tower

Widowed after a long marriage, Dorelia MacCraith swaps the family home for a house with a tower, and there, raised above the run of daily life, sets out to rewrite the stories of old women poorly treated by literature. Throughout this winding story, Dorelia and the elderly artist Elizabeth Bunting are sustained by a friendship that reaches back to their years at art school, and bonded by the secrets of a six-month period when they painted together in France. The loneliness of not belonging, of being cut adrift by grief, betrayal, or old age, binds these twelve connected stories into a dazzling composite novel. Within its complex crossings and connections, young and old inhabit separate yet overlapping firmaments; grown children, though loved and loving, cannot imagine their parents’ young lives. For most, the past is not past, but exerts a magnetic pull, while future happiness hinges on retreat, or escape.

Carol Lefevre holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, where she is a Visiting Research Fellow. Her novel Nights in the Asylum, Picador (UK) and Vintage (Australia) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, won the 2008 Nita B. Kibble Award for Women Writers, and the People’ s Choice Award. If You Were Mine (2008) was published by Vintage. Her most recent book Murmurations was shortlisted for the 2021 Cristina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’ s Literary Awards, and the Fiction Prize in the 2022 South Australian Festival Awards for Literature.

The Tower Fish The Tower Kandahar The Tower At Swan’ s Hotel The Tower Life Support The Tower Esperine The Tower The Little Flower The Tower Monkey Puzzle The Tower Dream Street The Tower Plunge The Tower Yes, No, Maybe So The Tower The House of First Happiness The Tower