The Tower

by Thea Lenarduzzi

Once upon a time, there was a tower on a hill, beyond the dark trees, somewhere north. An octagonal tower on two 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.  

Genres: Nonfiction

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 9, 2025

Reviews

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasnt exactly what I was expecting, which a story about a "modern day" Rapunzel. However, the stories that Thea Lenarduzzi tells are quite different.

She has heard the story of a young woman whose wealthy father, on learning that the girl (Annie) has tuberculosis, has a tower built near the family home where Annie lives until her death 3 years later.

The narrator follows the breadcrumbs of the story to the rebuilt tower, quizzing locals along the way but learns that the story is not the one she has been told originally.

Interspersed with this story is that if the narrator, whose own young life was blighted in quite a different way.

This is a story about stories and how, quite often, we start out with one idea of where we are going only to find that isnt where we end up. It is also a story about the abuse or misuse of power - the young woman doomed to spend her remaining years alone juxtaposed with the experience of the narrator.

An interesting read but not quite as engaging as I expected. It would bear a second reading.

Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.

[Rosie Owen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions & NetGalley for this advanced review copy :)

'The Tower' is an ode to storytelling. When author Thea Lenarduzzi becomes transfixed by local lore of a girl locked up in a tower, she enters a lyrically biographical pursuit to uncover the true story of the young girl, Annie, thought to have died there of TB. As her journey to find a narrative continues, however, she is met with challenges to the story she wants to discover.

'The Tower' is gently questioning, teasing out the questions inherent to biography: the origin and impact of how and what we choose to tell, how stories can emerge involuntarily, how telling the stories of others will always expose and involve us in some way.

This had a really interesting premise, but did lack punch in places - stylistically meandering, I found certain sections did struggle to contain Lenarduzzi's mass of references to other books, authors, and writers. The effect is a book that sprawls loosely in many directions, without hitting home any true point (perhaps intentional?)

That being said, I found the ebbs and flows of this book quietly intriguing - at no point was I exactly sure where it was going, but the thoughts put forward were consistently interesting, especially when looking at personal histories and causality.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book about finding a character and a story and then following the meagre threads of history to discover more.
There is disappointment and there is also the slow reveal about how what interests us can also mirror our own experiences and help us to put them in a different context. There are plenty of references to other writers and how they have observed the world.

I think I would have given the book an extra star but for one passage in which the narrator visits a remote village bookshop where they tell her that their bestselling book is George Orwell’s Why I Write which allows her to go on a several page digression about Orwell and his book. I would have been happy to listen to that without using the bookshop as a prompt, because that made it feel fake.

The author, who refers to herself in the third person as ‘T’ throughout the book, hears a story about a young woman who was confined to a tower where she lived out her few brief years before dying of tuberculosis. Events that are supposed to have happened about a century ago. T sets out to discover more about the young woman named Annie.

At some point she found herself looking at a picture – a postcard actually – in which the family’s manor, set on a low hill, was surrounded on three sides by large oaks and beeches, their foliage skimming the ground like heavy flounced skirts. All was black and white, but the silvery brightness of a cloudless sky reflected in the roof slates and the bleached , patchy lawn in the foreground suggested sunshine, heat. The house was two-tone stone, pale edges framing dark walls, with huge windows looking onto a sweet, romantic garden full of elegantly sculpted shrubs, and beyond, across the estate, to the spot where she, the observer, was notionally standing. A watermark named the photography studio of Francis Frith, an entrepreneur who set out to capture on film very town and village in the land, capitalizing on new technology that made each image cheaply and infinitely reproductible. He shrank the world and sold it back piecemeal to the people who owned it.

I love that last line about the photographer. T goes on to describe how her investigation of the small amount of information became obsessive.

Sometime she thought she must be further from Annie than when she had started, and the whole thing was futile, absurd. To make a woman out of so little. She was sending more time reading about other things because she had so quickly exhausted the vanishingly small amount she could unearth about Annie. When she did find something that might connect her in even the most tangential way, she got hooked, only realizing when she came up for air hours or days later that she had lost sight of land. It was like a police investigation, she told herself, and she was the detective: she had a duty to follow all lines of enquiry, whether they pointed towards or away from the matter immediately at hand. She didn’t say ‘crime’ because there was no body, yet.

The author leaves her own home behind and heads to the remote village where this vast family house and the distant tower were built. Except that the house is long since demolished and all the remains is the tower surrounded by parklike grounds. On the train to the north, T observes what other passengers are watching on their phones, and this prompts this observation, which makes the book so interesting and insightful:

The woman next to T was watching a programme about extravagantly wealthy women, who lived in vast stuccoed palaces in distant pink hills, high above the rest of us. The super-saturated colours and blunt cuts caught T’s eye like strobing lights; the word REAL flashed across the screen at regular intervals. They unhinged her, those programmes, the way they blurred fact and fiction and made a mockery of both, how they played fast and loose with time, reordering people’s lives to fit a narrative arc devised in the writers’ room. Something about the spirit was off, she thought, less distasteful than recklessly, cruelly disorientating: how you were asked to believe and not believe at the same time.

After spending a couple of days in the village close to the site of the old hall, T hears many versions of the story about Annie and what happened to her. She believes that Annie’s father had imprisoned her in the tower because of her illness and to keep the rest of his family safe. This leads her into a long discourse about Katherine Mansfield, in which she quotes books by C K Stead and Anna Jackson (whose poems I was reading just a few days ago). She quotes books and diaries that refer to illness and tuberculosis.

SPOILER ALERT I’m about to give away something important.

But after an encounter with the village historian and the local undertaker, T discovers that almost all the stories she has heard and believed are false. Annie did not die in her early twenties, alone and in the tower, but lived into her late-eighties.

Until the revelations of the historian and the undertaker, Annie had for a decade or more occupied a space in her life, in her head and – if you’ll allow – in her heart. She had felt for her, for the fact that she had suffered, and that nobody seemed to know or much care. Annie had been a never ending source of feeling, a simple story in which injustice was unambiguous; no need to dig deep or examine anything too closely.

The book has three sections: A Girl, Offcomers and A Kind of Finding. The word offcomers is one used in the villages for people from elsewhere – foreigners or visitors. We cover the obsession with Annie, the discoveries made in the village and then move on to deal with what comes after those revelations. We turn to look more closely at the life of T. For example we hear about the debilitating illness she suffered as a child and we touch on some abusive behaviour by a train driver when she was a child. The things that have shaped her and also her interest in Annie. Now it is time to move forwards.

[Chris L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In ‘The Tower’, Thea Lenarduzzi tracks her obsession with finding out about a young woman named Annie and how she lived and died. She supposedly lived in a tower where she was kept away from her family because of her tuberculosis. Lenarduzzi sees Annie’s tuberculosis diagnosis as an entry point for discussions about illness and the way that we process that illness upon our bodies and our minds. ‘The Tower’ is a combination of historical document, biography, literary criticism and social commentary.

Lenarduzzi investigates what could have happened to Annie. What were the methods for treating tuberculosis? How were women treated differently from male patients with the same disease? Why were women so often closed off from their families and seen as destructive forces when male sufferers were seen as tragic and lovable romantic figures? She builds up the image of Annie in her mind, and consequently, she researches whether the idea of Annie is a realistic one or if she has created an alternate image of Annie based on what she wants Annie to be. It’s a fascinating portrait of a writer who looks for inspiration and solace from someone she has never met. She needs Annie to be the long-suffering tuberculosis sufferer because Lenarduzzi connects with her on that level.

Alongside that particular narrative we also get Lenarduzzi’s personal history and how that influences her writing and the way she views her own body. She discusses the way she looks to literature for answers about illness and death. She writes about Katharine Mansfield, Susan Sontag, Thomas Mann and others who have raised questions about what it means to inhabit an ill or diseased body. What happens when your body betrays you?

There are more revelations later in the book that I will not spoil but they shine a light on the body, and how we move within society. These discussions deepen the relevance of Lenarduzzi’s enquiry into Annie’s history. We understand why she feels so drawn to Annie and the lack of information about her.

If there’s a drawback, it’s that the book feels that it goes on a bit too long as Lenarduzzi restates her main points in different ways. It’s a small quibble as it’s a short book, but I would have cut it down by a few pages to remove some of this. This does not ultimately diminish the power of the book. ‘The Tower’ is an extremely important meditation on bodily autonomy, illness, and the truths we tell about our bodies.

[Emma Devlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi, and Fitzcarraldo is one of my favourite publishers, so I was really excited to read this. I’m glad I did.

Ostensibly, it’s an investigation into the life of a young woman (‘Annie’) who, according to local legend, was shut away in a tower at the age of 18 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. However, if you go in hoping for a neat resolution to that story, you’ll be disappointed. That’s the point. Really, it’s an investigation into why we tell the stories we tell, and about the fraught and permeable boundaries between fact and fiction. The first two sections use third person (Lenarduzzi becomes ‘T’) and outline the process of discovering the story and building a narrative for who Annie was, how she lived and what her life was like in the tower. The last section is where Lenarduzzi, after uncovering a twist in the real-life Annie’s story, questions why she was so drawn to Annie and her story in the first place.

The whole thing is written in beautiful, rigorous prose, drawing on the lives of Marie Bashkirtseff and Katherine Mansfield, among other, to explore themes of identity, power and illness within the context of telling one’s own story. While at times I found the conceit of the third person, especially the quasi-fairy tale nature of its telling, a little grating, the last section, where T finally becomes Thea, helps resolve a lot of the issues I was having. It becomes a really interesting meditation on what storytelling and acts of imagination can achieve, but also how they can be limiting. Lenarduzzi has a personal stake in Annie’s story. She becomes possessive of it, sometimes to the point of arrogance when speaking to locals. It’s the gradual realisation of this, and why, which is the central premise of the book. This is pre-figured by a lot of the narrative choices in the first two sections in a way that I found really admirable and inventive. Ultimately, it’s an act of power to claim a story and use it to help tell our own.

Out in October from Fitzcarraldo Editions. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

[Gayle (OutsmartYourShelf) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A writer, here named T, becomes obsessed with the story of a young woman named Elizabeth Annie, who according to local legend, lived in a specially constructed tower on her family's estate around the turn of the 20th century. Annie had apparently contracted tuberculosis & instead of going to a sanitorium, her father constructed the octagonal tower. After 3 years, Annie was said to have died of the illness, & over the next few years the other family members either died or moved away with the house being demolished whilst the tower still stands. After trying to piece together the story over several years, including looking for Annie's birth & death certificates, even visiting the area & speaking to locals T learns something that turns her whole understanding of Annie's story on its head.

I'm definitely more of a history & facts person so I found the sections on the rich & famous who had died young of tuberculosis very interesting. The section where it moves onto the exploration of the function of storytelling was not really my thing. Stories have been used since the distant past to explain the unexplainable & to make the unfamiliar familiar. Some stories will resonate with us, whilst others don't, because of what they speak to in our own lives or how our experiences lead us to read things into them that perhaps aren't there. Overall it was interesting but I wouldn't rush to pick it up again. 3.25 stars (rounded down)

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Fitzcarraldo Editions, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tower is a difficult book to describe. It’s not quite fiction, but it doesn’t feel like non-fiction either. It’s a memoir but it’s also an essay and an ode to the power of storytelling. The book follows an author known only as ‘T.’ – presumably Thea Lenarduzzi herself – as she becomes obsessed with the story of a young woman, Annie, who developed tuberculosis in the early 20th century and, according to local legend, was locked away by her father in a tower specially built on the family estate. After living there in isolation for several years, she is said to have died from the disease and although the house has since been demolished, the tower still remains.

T. becomes completely fixated on Annie and her tragic life, determined to find out everything she can about her illness, her imprisonment and her death. She spends a lot of time researching the history of TB, its symptoms and the various treatments, also looking at the lives of famous sufferers such as the author Katherine Mansfield. She visits the now abandoned tower, speaks to historians and archivists and listens to tales told by local residents. All of this is covered in the first two sections of the book and I found most of it fascinating. T. goes off on a lot of lengthy tangents and meanders from one subject to another, but in general Annie’s story was very compelling…

Until, suddenly, we discover that everything we – and T. – thought we knew about Annie may not necessarily be true after all. In the third section of the book, Lenarduzzi switches from writing in the third person to the first person and becomes herself again, instead of a character known as T. This final section takes the form of a long discussion of storytelling, raising lots of intriguing questions. What is a story and who chooses how it should be told? What is it that draws us to certain stories and not others? As Lenarduzzi explains:

Perhaps for now I should simply say that we don’t always tell the story we want to tell. We can’t always choose our place in it, nor how it ends, or even if it does. That, reader, is the stuff of fiction.

The Tower, then, wasn’t quite what I expected, but it’s a book that surprised me several times and left me with a lot to think about at the end! Thea Lenarduzzi has written another book, Dandelions, inspired by her family history, which sounds equally interesting.

[Joe Skilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

“ T thought again of our cannibal nature; how Mansfield said we devoured each other all the time. How unctuous are the fats of another's life, how dizzying their sugars in our bloodstream, the infinite ways in which we may be altered, mutually.


***

Mist hung on a train platform almost unchanged since it was built it in the mid-1800s, so that it was easy to fancy mist as steam, released in great puffs from one of the old engines. T was more than a thousand feet above sea level, a sign informed her, at the highest mainline station in the land. Amid the vague grey everything - the stone of the station house, the sky and mist and rain, the mood of autumn exhaling into winter - occasional streaks of red denoted lampposts, window frames, doorways, gut-ters, the few details that prevented the old building from being swallowed by atmosphere. The valley beneath her and the steep climbs all around were sprayed in green and gold and oxblood.

***

It was time for T to leave, according to the grammar of his movements.


***

Now, it was a nuisance, pure inconvenience, and a reminder of a magical way of thinking that no longer served her.”

[Amanda]

A fairytale-esque meditation on storytelling, illness, power, and the ways women’s bodies have been written (and miswritten) through history.

We follow breadcrumbs (figuratively speaking) through the legend of Annie, a young woman isolated after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. What begins as a search for her story becomes a fascinating portrait of a writer searching for meaning and connection in the life of someone she never knew.

The final section really pulled it all together for me. The prose is beautiful, the story quietly haunting. Thoughtful and original, though I’m still not entirely sure how to categorise it, or even how to describe it.

[booksinmybag · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have you ever become obsessed with something and then done a deep dive to find out more about it, going off on multiple tangents and falling down multiple rabbit holes in the process? This book is exactly like that.

We’re in the authors brain as she obsesses over this tower and the potential stories held within it. She’s on a journey to figure out what story she’s telling and honestly I don’t know if we ever really got there. It was all over the place and the final section felt like reading a different book entirely.

[Catriona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. Thea Lenarduzzi's writing is calm and clear, and her approach to the (his)story of Annie, the young woman suffering from tuberculosis who was kept in a tower by her family, is methodical and engaging. But things are not as they seem, and it becomes clear that this is a book about the stories we tell others about ourselves, as well as the ones we keep hidden, and about the lack of agency that the young have over their own lives.
A genuinely interesting and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

[Beth Younge · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a really interesting read as it had such an interesting tone to the voice and the story at times felt like a literary fiction and not a memoir. The story of Annie was so compelling to follow and i love how this and the story of Thea and her family and research were intertwined. The language used in this was chosen well and i was gripped throughout. The world building was good and i thought the language used helped this too. I would recommend this book to people who like their memoirs to have more of literary fiction vibe.

I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a real feast. Thea Lenarduzzi employs both her fierce intelligence and narrative skills to weave a patchwork of stories, where narrative self, myth, science and folklore all end up tightly knitted within the fabric of a turbulent, melancholic yet precise and lucid fever dream.
Lenarduzzi interrogates the way we tell stories, not only the reasons why we get attached to a story rather than another, but what captivates and captures us, what shakes us to our very core and keeps us hooked. Power, recognition, positioning, importance, status and prestige always come to play a part in the way we remember other people's stories, and the way we tell them. Unearthing the mysteries of storytelling and reliability, factual and literary truth, narrative POV and the interplay between facts and fiction and the liminal space in between, where all stories are born, Lenarduzzi surprises the reader as much as herself, writing against expectations and sometimes against self preservation.