From AudioFile
This collection of five short novels and one essay is characteristic of Fowles's intense, painterly vision of the natural world and the world of human relations. The stories are inviting: a painter living in seclusion with two young female attendants, a successful writer whose latest manuscript is destroyed, a medieval love story, a man who disappears and a family picnic in France on a sunny Sunday. Jonathan Oliver reads with meticulous care for phrase and punctuation, inviting attention to Fowles's image-laden descriptions, spare but enigmatic plots and mysterious revelations of character. Oliver makes the often jarring transition between novels gracefully. He captures Fowles's ironic tone but doesn't overplay it and is as much at home playing a young burglar as a lecherous film producer. L.R.S. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM THE PUBLISHER

As part of Back Bay's ongoing effort to make the works of John Fowles available in uniform trade paperback editions, The Ebony Tower is released to coincide with the paperback publication of Wormholes, the author's acclaimed collection of essays and occasional writings.

The Ebony Tower, which comprises a novella, three stories, and a translation of a medieval French tale, echoes themes from Fowles's widely praised and bestselling novels as it probes the fitful relations between love and hate, pleasure and pain, fantasy and reality.

FROM THE CRITICS

AudioFile

This collection of five short novels and one essay is characteristic of Fowles￯﾿ﾽs intense, painterly vision of the natural world and the world of human relations. The stories are inviting: a painter living in seclusion with two young female attendants, a successful writer whose latest manuscript is destroyed, a medieval love story, a man who disappears and a family picnic in France on a sunny Sunday. Jonathan Oliver reads with meticulous care for phrase and punctuation, inviting attention to Fowles￯﾿ﾽs image-laden descriptions, spare but enigmatic plots and mysterious revelations of character. Oliver makes the often jarring transition between novels gracefully. He captures Fowles￯﾿ﾽs ironic tone but doesn￯﾿ﾽt overplay it and is as much at home playing a young burglar as a lecherous film producer. L.R.S. ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Theodore Solotaroff - The New York Times Book Review, 1974