The Watch Tower

After Laura and Clare are abandoned by their mother, Felix is there to help, even to marry Laura if she will have him. Little by little the sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty, his need to control. A novel of relentless and acute psychological power, from one of Australia's greatest writers.

Elizabeth Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 but her family soon relocated to Newcastle where she lived until she was eleven.

In 1951 Harrower moved to London. She travelled extensively and she began to write fiction. Her first novel Down in the City was published in 1957, and was followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, the story of an Australian law student in London, her only novel not set in Sydney. The Watch Tower appeared in 1966. Between 1961 and 1967 she worked in publishing, for Macmillan.

No further novels were published though Harrower continued to write short fiction. Her work is austere, intelligent, ruthless in its perceptions about men and women. She was admired by many of her contemporaries, including Patrick White and Christina Stead, and is without doubt among the most important writers of the postwar period in Australia.

Elizabeth Harrower lives in Sydney.

Joan London's collected stories are published as The New Dark Age. Her first novel, Gilgamesh, won the Age Book of the Year for Fiction in 2002, and The Good Parents won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2009.