The Watch Tower: Text Classics

'Elizabeth Harrower's thrilling 1966 novel The Watch Tower comes rampaging back from decades of disgraceful neglect: a wartime Sydney story of two abandoned sisters and the arrival in their lives of Felix, one of literature's most ferociously realised nasty pieces of work.' Helen Garner

Introduced by Joan London
Winner, Patrick White Award 1996

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 two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty, his need to control.

Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power.

'Haunting and delicate.' Kirkus Reviews

'A superb psychological novel that will creep into your bones.' Michelle de Kretser, The Monthly

'This is a harrowing novel, relentless in its depiction of marital enslavement, spiritual self-destruction and the exploited condition of women in a masculinist society...It is a brilliant achievement.' Washington Post

'As gripping and terrifying as any horror story...An astonishing book.' Guardian