The Watch Tower: Text Classics

‘Each of Harrower’s four novels is concerned with entrapment of one sort or another, through family or youth or love. But The Watch Tower, her last novel, is almost like a distillation in its vision of the forces of good and evil. Something runs clear and strong through this wonderful, painful novel, the dark and the light. The victim and the survivor. Suffering and joy. The knowledge of both. Reality.’

Joan London, Lit Hub

'I read The Watch Tower with a mixture of fascination and horror. It was impossible to put down...Her acute psychological assessments are made from gestures, language and glances and she is brilliant on power, isolation and class.'

Ramona Koval, Australian

‘To create a monster as continually credible, comic and nauseating as Felix is a feat of a very high order. But to control that creation, as Miss Harrower does, so that Clare remains the centre of interest is an achievement even more rare. The Watch Tower is a triumph of art over virtuosity...a dense, profoundly moral novel of our time.’

H.G. Kippax, 19 November 1966, Sydney Morning Herald

'Haunting...Harrower captures brilliantly the struggle to retain a self.'

Guardian