A Few Days in the Country: And Other Stories

Elizabeth Harrower is the author of the novels Down in the City, The Long Prospect, The Catherine Wheel andThe Watch Tower—all of which have been republished as Text Classics—and In Certain Circles, which was published in 2014 and in early 2015 was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Elizabeth lives in Sydney. ‘When Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower came ‘roaring out of forty years in obscurity’, as Helen Garner put it in the Australian’s 2012 round-up of best books, we didn’t know that we’d go on to republish all of Elizabeth’s work.’ Read this feature on the Text blog by senior editor David Winter.‘Harrower’s writing is witty, desolate, truth-seeking, and complexly polished. Everything (except feeling, which is passionately and directly confessed) is controlled and put under precise formal pressure. Her sentences, which have an unsettling candor, launch a curling assault on the reader, often twisting in unexpected ways…Harrower is an exceptionally subtle psychologist…[Her] five novels have an almost relentless thematic consistency and a strikingly similar darkness of vision.’ James Wood, New Yorker