The Topless Tower

`The Garden, My Mother, My Friends, the Man Dressed in Black, the Pictures Lined up Against the Fence...All of These Disappeared, and I Found Myself Inside a Tower, The Tower from the Pictures, with Its Lugubrious Rooms'

On the arrival of a mysterious stranger laden with paintings, nine-year-old Leandro finds his quiet life disrupted instantly and mysteriously. He awakens locked in a windowless room in a topless tower, the subject of one of the stranger's eeric paintings. His childish voice draws the reader into a mythical world full of imaginary beings.

Basking in her friendship with literary luminaries such as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine poet and author Silvina Ocampo was among the foremost figures in modern South American literature. Heavily influenced by nonsense literature such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the surrealist movement in South America, The Topless Tower features all the typical hallmarks of Ocampo's fantastical writing. With subtle inflections of language and tremendous displays of imagination running riot, Ocampo's writing is beautifully translated by James Womack.

Silvina Ocampo (1903-93) was an Argentine poet and short-story writer. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares and collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. She won numerous awards, including the first prize in the 1962 National Poetry Competition for Lo amargo por dulce.