Thea Lenarduzzi at Dead Ink Books

In the latest launch at the Dead Ink Books store on Smithdown Road, you’ll hear from Fitzcarraldo-published Thea Lenarduzzi as she reads from her second book, The Tower, and chats about it with Dr Sophie Oliver.

Out on the very same day, The Tower, explains fellow writer Daisy Lafarge “masterfully loops back on itself and retraces its own steps to uncover the secrets, wishes and fears that lurk in the stories we tell about ourselves, and what draws us to those of others”. It relates her morbid preoccupation with a story about a young woman who lived and died in a tower, more than a century ago.

Here’s the book’s blurb: “Once upon a time, there was a tower on a hill, beyond the dark trees, somewhere north. An octagonal tower on two levels: 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.”

Her debut book Dandelions was also rich in folk legends, and won the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions / Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit’. A family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, along with settings Italy, Dandelions contains nods to the north of England – her father grew up in Longsight, Manchester, in the 1950s and her mum is Liverpudlian. She discussed that work at the time of its release with the University of Manchester Centre for New Writing’s co-director Kaye Mitchell.

Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor, formerly at the Times Literary Supplement. She was born in 1986 in a town called Erba (‘grass’) and raised in northern Italy, moving to the UK in 2004, and now lives in East Sussex.

Dr Sophie Oliver is an interdisciplinary scholar, curator and writer who specialises in modernist women writers and artists, fashion, the feminist avant-garde, and feminist approaches to cultural history.