#rosemacaulay

For writer Joanna Trollope, one book towers above the rest

"I’ll read The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay aloud to anybody who will stand still long enough to be read to."

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

Writer Joanna Trollope’s chosen book is The Towers of Trezibond, by “literary lioness” Rose Macaulay. Trollope, something of literary lioness herself, first read it when she was a young teenager.

Trollope explains that, “immediately after the war there were no books, because there was no paper. We’d all had to send our books for salvage for the war effort.”

So, this was one of the first books made available to her as a girl.

“It’s the story of a group of rather eccentric people going to set up an Anglican mission in Turkey in the very early ‘50s. But really, you can ignore all that - it’s an everything book.”

“It’s a travel book. It’s a love story. It’s fantastically lyrical. It’s often incredibly witty. It’s a polemic on female emancipation. It’s a polemic on religious indoctrination. It’s got everything in it you can possibly imagine: journalists, travellers, a camel, a really funny ape, wonderfully eccentric English people, and a very delightful heroine called Laurie who is the first person of the book, and whom one becomes completely addicted to, as a personality, as the book goes on.”

"#THISBOOK will absorb you. It will engage you. It will enchant you. It will make you laugh. It might easily make you cry."

Laurie is a writer in her thirties - a cultivated, witty and clever woman with an incredible inner life, in the middle of a forbidden love affair with a married man named Vere.

“Laurie is in a state of absolute anguish about this love affair, but she cannot give it up and nor can Vere. So, she sets out on this extraordinary mission to The Towers of Trebizond - the modern city of Trabzon. It was called Trebizond in the old days. It’s a sort of glittering, byzantine, magical fantasy of a place - with minarets and onion domes and spires, it’s a fairytale of a place,” explains Trollope.

“#THISBOOK has a warmth of heart. There’s a feeling that we really are all in this together. Human beings are a chequered lot. There are some black and some white, but mostly we are shades of grey, as people.”

“I love this book for the attitude to life. I love the life affirming quality,” she says. 

“I love Laurie’s appetite for the oddness of humanity, the quirks of life, the jokes - how funny this book is as well as how beautiful, and how lyrical and how odd.”

“My copy of this book is cherished. I feel it’s been around a lot of my life. I’ve certainly read it every decade. I would think there are moments when I’ve dipped into bits of it, more often than that. But I read it aloud to my children. I’ll read it aloud to anybody who will stand still long enough to be read to.”

Joanna Trollope OBE is the author of 17 highly acclaimed contemporary bestselling novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia's Daughters, and 10 historical novels published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. Joanna chose Dame Rose Macaulay’s 1956 novel The Towers of Trezibond, the last and most successful of the writer’s novels.