Life, and writing, can expand from a detail: to which extent must this detail be personal? In this remarkable and surprising book, Thea Lenarduzzi wanders trough the many paths of fiction-making, in a literary quest to find out if the girl in the tower is a romanticised symbol, an exhausted trope, a resourceful broken archive at the beginning of a powerful story, hers as much as ours. Truly fascinating and brimming with intellectual energy.
Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know With her sensitive, fable-like unravelling of a mysterious anecdote, Thea Lenarduzzi enlists and subverts all the elements of a gripping story a secret, a journey, doubt and denouement to emerge with an intricately crafted meditation on the nature of narrative itself. The Tower 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.
Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug In her second remarkable and equally wise book, Lenarduzzi explores how we shape and share our stories of ourselves and of others. Some are rooted in truth, others are constructed over generations of telling, and then there are those that relate to the depths of consciousness. She leads us with lyrical and meticulous prose via convincing digressions to an unexpected place to which I feel privileged to have journeyed.
Julia Bueno, author of Everyones A Critic The Tower is about the allure (and refusal) of certain narratives, about the sublime quest an author takes when she embarks on the act of storytelling. Its form a composite of fiction, memoir, history mirrors its subject matter and, excitingly, stages its very questions. In this elegantly composed, layered and expansive book, Thea Lenarduzzi articulates something of the mysterious nature of stories while also making an argument for all that is unknowable.
Lauren Aimee Curtis, author of Strangers at the Port Dandelions is a book of hauntings, intensely experienced, pierced by occasional terrors, yet irradiated throughout by passionate attachment. Generations of family ghosts wander between Italy and England, their lives summoned from a beloved grandmothers long memories and the authors own wide-roaming, often poetic reflections on botany, history and language. Thea Lenarduzzi has spread out before us a feast of sensuous and sensitive, nuanced and deeply appealing testimony to migration, survival, and complicated identities at a time when such thoughtfulness is rare and desperately needed.
Marina Warner, author of Inventory of a Life Mislaid (praise for Dandelions) Beautifully observed and written with heart and an infectious curiosity, Thea Lenarduzzis Dandelions parses the complex ways in which we live out our histories and carry the past within us, through ritual, food, language and legend. Like rifling through an overflowing drawer or opening an ancient photo album, Lenarduzzi unearths glinting gems of family fiction, introducing us to a shifting cast of memorable characters whose journeys, stories and passions its our joy to share.
Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting (praise for Dandelions) In this subtle and elegant family memoir, Thea Lenarduzzi gathers the ghost seeds between her present life in England and her familys past in Italy. A meditation on roots, inheritance and homesickness, Dandelions is also a reminder that what will survive of us is love.
Frances Wilson, author of Burning Man (praise for Dandelions) Dandelions is spellbinding. Like the polished beads of a secular rosary, each bearing a remembrance, Lenarduzzis ancestral memoir conjures intimate histories of migration, love, and loss across decades of passages between Italy and England. Her redoubtable grandmother Dirce will lure you in, as she unfolds fragmentary myths with a sly wit, whispering ascolta, listen and you wont resist.
Anna Della Subin, author of Accidental Gods (praise for Dandelions) Dandelions is a beautiful, precise and exceptionally intelligent family memoir. In it, Lenarduzzi carefully detangles a complex web of interlocking stories, which she finds to be threaded through with warmth, aspiration and hope. In the figure of Dirce we find a kind-hearted grandmother and compendium of stories both offering wisdom and familial mythology like a Friulian oracle. Dandelions marks the arrival of a stunning new voice.
Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment (praise for Dandelions)
